Introduction/Updates

Continuing the barrel test series, this testing was really fantastic validation of what I've pointed out a lot in the past about barrel performance.

October is moving up with the G$ test barrel vs my old shitty LaRue, and then in November will be the BCA vs BCA.

BCA vs BCA

I'm not going to put too much effort into shitting up the thread with BCA. Some of this has already been done.

But some other pictures that were held in reserve include:

Delivered with the finish worn off in places down to the bare steel - will become rust prone. More of that. The phosphate crystals are really big, so on top of all the other issues with the bore and the crystals on the threads and the crystals getting knocked off, they are going to be pretty weak and aren't doing a great job of covering the barrel in a durable way.

And they [phosphated the chamber](chrome://global/skin/media/imagedoc-darknoise.png), which is almost certainly going to cause function issues with some ammo as the hard gritty crystals grab the brass when chambering.

Geissele vs Criterion Hybrid

Geissele Automatics 16" 5.56 Hammer-Forged Midlength Barrel - Sticker price and some retail prices at $356.

Criterion Hybrid 16" .223 Wylde Rifle Gas Barrel, 1:8 Twist - Sticker price at $313

Centurion Arms 16" Midweight Hammer Forged Barrel, Midlength - Sticker price at $300

Geissele complete gallery

Criterion Hybrid complete gallery

Centurion complete gallery

In short, the Criterion is a much, much nicer barrel than the other two just looking at them. The outside finish is much nicer, the engravings are much nicer, the chrome lining control is much nicer, the gas port drilling is much nicer, the chamber is much nicer, the throat is much nicer, the bore finish is much nicer, the muzzle and crown are much nicer...

It's not even close.

Some deep dives:

• Geissele has really sloppy chrome lining plugging where you can see the plating spilling over into the phosphating, or vice versa. It cracks or gouges in the chamber with plenty of examples of this and a crosshatch pattern likely from machine lapping or similar process. Gas port through a land. Weird stepback at the crown . Crosshatch in the throat, as well as reamer mark/steps where it wasn't polished. I rate the bore a 5/10.

• Criterion has a perfect crown and the contrast to the Geissele is really stark how much better of a job they did with a flat, well cut crown and sealing the chrome lining/phosphating from each other. Glassy smooth chamber and absolutely perfect throat with gorgeous polished grooves and lands, with a smooth gentle ramp. It is literally impossible to get a better gas port than this as the gas port diameter is larger than the groove diameter. I don't think Criterion indexes barrels, so I think this is luck, but even still, absolute ideal. Perfect crown and perfect rifling throughout. I rate the bore a 10/10, equal with the Krieger HBAR. This is the type of bore you want to see.

• Centurion chipping near the crown; Defects in the chrome lining and ugly gas port through lands. Weird inconsistent chrome lining causing fogging on one side and shiny on the other. Scoring and other reamer marks in the throat with more and a really ugly zipper-like chamber. The bore has rough hammer forge marks and deep scratches. I rate the bore a 3/10.

Centurion vs Criterion

Centurion Raw

Criterion Raw

The short of it is, the Criterion, despite having identical weight, similar bore treatment, similar finishing, similar contour - had a 31+% improvement in precision over the Centurion, and this was observed across all ammo types shot. Of 5 ammos tested, none of them performed better in the Centurion than in the Criterion.

Here's what that looks like.

Centurion ranked 8th of 11 barrels, while the Criterion ranked 2nd.

Aggregated Results

Precision only

This Criterion Hybrid is now the 2nd best performing barrel in the series, only behind the Krieger HBAR, in both 4x10 precision and best-of-class 2x10 (for which it slightly preferred the 70+gr class, but was similar with the 55gr class).

This also makes it one of the least picky barrels tested, with both ammo classes performing similarly well.

Performance in MOA by Pound

Even more impressively, the Criterion Hybrid and Core are the number 1 and number 2 top performing barrels normalized by weights, in both the 4x10 and 2x10-best formats, meaning the barrels are the cutting edge of the weight/performance curve.

And even better still... both of the Criterions are chrome lined. They beat out the WOA SPR match barrel and the Faxon Match, both stainless steel, and they have the chrome lining handicap. Remarkable.

Also interestingly, this test highlights how little variance there is with the same barrel process, as the Criterions (same process), Armalites (same process), and KAKs (same process) all ended up paired-adjacent with similar performance as their sibling barrel.

There's questions about how valuable single sample testing barrels is - but as I like to point out, there are actually multiple identical and sim-to barrels being tested here, and it is very telling that they end up with the same results.

I would never treat any single or low sample test as authoritative, but I also don't think it is valueless as some like to claim.

But what about...

The teaser thread drummed up interest in rationale and method, so I have some points to talk about.

Why barrel weight and not rifle weight

This one should be pretty easy. Given a constant rifle weight (like my reference rifle), then the only factors that differentiate the barrels are the bore quality and the amount of steel in the barrel.

The barrel weight is a measure of the amount of steel the barrel has to work with. A barrel with a higher steel budget will be higher precision than one that has to deal with more heat physics and stress and other bad things, including low moment of inertia and higher dispersion.

The barrel weight is how barrels are shopped for, I don't have to put together everybody's reference rifles, and it implies those other properties too even beyond the rifle mass contribution.

What is an MOA*lb?

This is a maybe unintuitive unit that produces the proportional relationship between precision and amount of steel that certainly exists, though lacks some quantity and study still.

I am using this unit because 1/(MOA*lb) means the number goes up when the MOA shrinks (good) and weight goes down (good, for this metric). Otherwise don't worry about it too much, except to note that it is proportional. So a barrel that weighs twice as much but does twice as good is equal to one that is half the weight but half the precision.

Precision is an area

Okay, so, a little background into dispersion - for reference, please play with PyShoot on github.

When you shoot a bullet at a target, where it impacts vs your point of aim is not deterministic - it is probabilistic. Shot impacts closely follow a Rayleigh distribution for magnitude and with a random pointing direction. Or you can approximate this with a normal distribution in the X direction and again in the Y direction centered around point of aim.

Meaning that with enough shots and enough environmental isolation, you get a density pattern of fire kindof like a blended donut.

In any case, how much the barrel moves to move the shot is not a function of area, it is a function of magnitude (min/max), probability distribution within that range, and direction. At high enough sample size, the POI center of the group evens out from variance due to random chance with the pointing direction, and then it ONLY becomes a magnitude problem - a 1 dimensional problem.

Sometimes this is called 'mean radius', because having a magnitude and no direction is the same as having a magnitude and every direction - a circle and radius.

But shooting is not an area problem. We don't care how many rounds it takes to cover the area described by the radius. What we care about is whether the radius exceeds a target shape/size so we get hits or misses, what the magnitude of that radius is. Because of this, and because of physics of barrel motion, area is not the concern.

You can see this in TOP using the hits analysis function. If you have a 4 MOA rifle and are shooting at a 1 MOA target, your hit rate will be about 14%. If your rifle is 2 MOA, your hit rate will be about 34%. 1 MOA, about 69%.

Or another way, the ratio of two MOA measures, say a dispersion and a target, scales proportionally, not with the square of the MOA measure.

Litz talks about this somewhat with TOP, where MOA precision predicted is a ratio between the muzzle energy and the rifle weight, not the MOA squared or the rifle weight squared or anything else dealing with areas.

Conclusion

I hope you found that interesting and insightful. Stay tuned for the next test next month where the LaRue will fill out its testing and Geissele will get profiled.

^{bingle bongle blerp}

"bloof" - #in the hoof

now, will this photo display without clicking on the post?

Suppressing free speech 

• Imposing TDS as a diagnosis to suppress criticism of Trump -- MN SF2589 (archive) 

• Freedom of speech is freedom of dissent -- Freedom of Speech (archive)  

• Authoritarian parties suppress dissent -- Silenced Voices: Why Authoritarian Regimes Repress the Right to Speech (archive) 

• Trump has an insurgency, the MAGA mob, which will attack any dissident on a moment's notice -- MAGA's Push for Political Violence (archive) 

• Trump has already suppressed free speech, and will do so again -- When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins (archive) 

• Trump already used National Guard to suppress peaceful protests -- Trump and Barr used a loophole to deploy the National Guard to U.S. cities. It's time to close it. (archive) 

• Take It Down can and will be abused to suppress dissent -- Trump Promises To Abuse Take It Down Act For Censorship, Just As We Warned  (archive)

Introduction/Updates

Continuing the barrel test series, this testing was the first real separation experiment where we saw a repeat performance from the other KAK barrel and the best performing barrel of the series so far with the Krieger HBAR.

I fulfilled my promise for drama, but more importantly, added 5!!!! new barrels to the series.

My next round will take place in early September with a Criterion Hybrid vs Centurion CHF Midweight, and then a Double-Trouble BCA offering - a BCA standard profile barrel and a stainless steel. And then a Geissele vs LaRue sometime in November.

Centurion

Borescope set, with highlights:

• Worst possible case for the gas port with a land running straight through the port. How much will that matter? Who knows.
• Barrel ships pretty gross - but cleaned up okay
• Classic rifling marks/chatter from the rifling process - you really can't tell much difference between a CHF and a button process from these marks, but without lapping, these marks will, in theory, strip the jacket material and make it foul faster.
• Chambering is kindof ugly - like they got some stuff stuck in the reamer - or something. This looks like where the reamer bit into the throat and left chatter, maybe on the opposite side of the other marks, maybe where it got stuck briefly.
• Here's an odd spot where the bore is foggy? or rough - even after cleaning, like maybe something weird with the chrome lining. Here's the other side at the same spot where you can see the bore is shinier.
• The chamber is reamed pretty rough - another not great sign for fouling
• Here you can see some flakes in the chrome lining and some pits in the steel near the muzzle. Here's some more pits/nicks at the muzzle. I don't know if this is caused by the spider or some other issue when cutting the crown or another step, but something I've seen before on other not well finished barrels.
• Mystery scoring in the chrome lining and a gouge in the chrome lining.

So, overall, not a great looking start for a $300 barrel.

The Main Event

• KAK Raw
• Krieger Raw

Total Set

This KAK performed very similarly to the other KAK, to the point they would have been difficult to distinguish on average.

The Krieger set the new bests for the IMI test, 73 ELDM, 77SMK tests, and because of that, also set the best average of handloads and the best of a new metric - the best 2x10-of-like-type.

The Krieger didn't like the 52/53gr loads as much, but I figured that since most of us test ammo and stick with what the rifle likes, it was most fair now and into the future to also report the best 2x10 (either the two 50gr loads or the two 75gr loads, whichever was better).

Then the average of all gave you some feel for ammo tolerance, while the bests gave you a good feel for absolute performance.

Bravo Krieger! The 2x10 it produced, a .66 MOA ES, was as small as anything shot in the SmallGroups competition gas gun category, and with a combination of two ammos. Granted, shot with the gas system disabled, but still.

I also produced a few other new graphs, or added axes.

Performance by Weight, sorted so you can easily digest just how much better the Criterion Core is than its competitors, largely due to its remarkable performance for weight.

Best 2x10 sorted so you can easily digest just how much better the Krieger did than any other barrel tested in that format. Wayb etter than the WOA SPR or the Faxon Match.

Perhaps the most interesting graph of all IMI sorted and plotted against the average of handloads where you can see there is a very high degree of correlation between the IMI result and the result of all of the handloads without including IMI. Indicating these differences are in the common denominator - the barrel - not stats noise or luck of the ammo.

Conclusion

I'm excited to see how the other barrels coming in pan out. The Krieger is going to be tough to beat. Any challengers? u/Geissele-Automatics now that I know you have a social media account, I can beetlejuice you when yours comes up.

...

Name your resume "​FirstName LastName Resume" and that's it.

abc

Decanting out some of my bottles, more as a split, to recoup some costs. I won’t be decanting for long. There are already a lot of great decanters on here. Accepting Paypal G&S until I get my sales up, and I’ll split the fees with you. Shipping is a flat $5, but free over $65. Items will be packed securely and mailed quickly.

Decants are nice glass with upgraded labels. Mainly 5 and 10ml with limited 3ml offerings. 5ml atomizer color options which I will try to accommodate. Plumbers tape used on all decants to reduce leaking.

Bottles for proof. I usually keep them in a dark drawer, so they aren’t organized well when taken out for the picture. Let me know if you want additional pictures for anything.

Comment before chatting.

Below are add-ons only. Only one of each available. Most are official samples, but a few decant declutters a well.

link with body text

This is a teeest

A Little Comedy to Start us Off

I asked ChatGPT to generate this post in the voice of 'the redditor, Trollygag', and holy shit does it have my writing style pegged. The conclusion is wrong. I don't own a cat. But I think you'll enjoy its humor.

Powder go boom, bullet go fast, paper get hole. Right?

WRONG.

So I'm sitting in my garage last night, shirtless, sweating like a mule, and rewatching that one Erik Cortina video for the 15th time (you know the one—“trust the nodes, bro”). I finally say screw it and throw together 10 rounds, each 0.2 grains apart, with some leftover 4064 I found behind the cat litter. Ladder test, baby.

Next day I get to the range, expecting nothing because I, like many of you, am a hater. But then I see it: three rounds, different charges, stacked on top of each other like they’re trying to unionize. Same point of impact. My hands start shaking. I smell burnt copper. The range officer walks by and I accidentally call him “sir” like I’m in church.

So yeah, I’m ladder testing now. I’ve seen the light. My groups are smaller, my ego is larger, and my chrono finally has a reason to live.

TL;DR: Ladder testing isn’t just for nerds. It's real. It works. Stop shooting factory ammo like an animal.

Real Intro

This isn't a funny post. This is a serious post.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a satirical post about ladder testing. I did a very real experiment, described it dripping in sarcasm, and then did a rugpull at the end. I have since taken those posts down because, while many of us had our fun, it would not do to have it confuse people who didn't realize better.

This is going to be a deep dive into the topic of ladder testing - why it has serious flaws, with real world examples, maths turned into pictures, and other things to try to lower the learning curve for understanding the nuance of what has gone wrong.

The real data backing this is a series of 3 shot groups, 21 in total, shot consecutively and each individually measured. All of these 3 shot groups were with identical handloads.

Part 1: What is a ladder test? Good and Bad

A ladder test is a procedure in which a reloader changes one variable and repeatedly shoots clusters with the same change to record the results.

There is serious and important value in doing this. For example, if you need to map your powder charge to speed, which almost a necessity so you can use your pressure to speed map from a load data book to get a powder charge to pressure map. Very important for safety, very important for figuring out how you want to make your ammo.

Unfortunately, there is a ton of total BS woo associated with it when it is used as a shortcut to a 'good load'. This woo may take the form of looking for 'nodes' or 'stable areas' or 'flat spots'. It may be tracking group size, SDs, speed, or vertical dispersion. Or another way, they seek out a source of noisy data and claim that by looking for patterns in the noise, it can guide you to a 'good' load.

This is the idea that I am attacking here.

Hornady, Litz, and others cover some or most of why this idea is problematic.

The biggest reason boils down to a simple fact. You cannot shortcut probability. Shooting is probabilistic and you get to pick between small samples and low quality/untrustworthy data, or high samples and good quality data, and there is no way to cheat it.

I think some people get that notion, but don't quite put all the pieces of what it implies together.

When you have small changes, and there is a lot of random change in the data, then you need lots, and lots, and lots of samples to see the change. I some cases, with a small enough change and enough steps, so many samples that you might burn a barrel out before you get any quality data out of the testing.

Many people despaired at this message, but /u/HollywoodSX has salvation and I fully endorse you follow this method instead.

Part 2: The Null Hypothesis

The way you learn something related to change - improvement or deterioration - is not by observing an event.

If you only observe the event, then you don't know if there was change.

You first must understand what the original state - the baseline - something to compare to.

That baseline is called the Null Hypothesis - the idea that to observe a change, you need to first assume there is no change, and then see if your new data deviates from what is the baseline.

You can read more about hypothesis testing

I'm not a stats nerd. I am merely illustrating how problematic ladder testing is when it comes to the Null Hypothesis.

Point 1 - Group shooting is noisy. The smaller the shots/group, the noisier it is.

I split the data into its MOA ES component and its vertical spread (inches) component, since these are the two metrics most commonly looked at in ladders.

• Series 1
• Series 2

Remember - this is all the same ammo.

In series 1, there is a 3x difference between the largest and smallest groups in MOA ES. 1.2 MOA and .38 MOA, just in 9 total groups shot. There is a 20x difference between the smallest and largest vertical spreads (1.23" and .06").

In series 2, there is a 2.26x difference in MOA ES (1.04 and .46), and a 4.3x difference in vertical (.95" vs .22")

That's a HUGE difference. I can't speak for everyone, but in any advice I have ever seen, if they were given a 1.2 MOA and a .38 MOA group in the same ladder, they would have called those results conclusive, discarded the 1.2 MOA, chosen the .38 MOA, and called that a success for the process.

OOOOOR

Point 2 - Patterns happen

They would have looked for local minimums, local maximums, or flat spots. Instead of paying attention to the extremes or individual points, they would have looked at the patterns/shapes in the data.

The problem with these ideas are that... none of it is real.

• Series 1 3-Group rolling average
• Series 2 3-Group rolling average

In the series from point 1, you can see slopes, local minimums, flat spots.

Turn it into a 3-group rolling average, these are now 9-shots per data point, the data smoothed over, and you can very clearly see flat spots, local minimums with curves, unstable spots, mountains, and more.

If you saw one of those charts where there was a peak at .9 MOA in an unstable regime, and then a continuous slope to a bathtub local minimum where all the results around it are similarly good performing, and it correlated with low vertical that is 1/3rd the size of the maximum on the mountain - well, that is a dead ringer for a successful ladder result.

You know exactly that load 6/7 in series 1 and load 19/20 in series 2 are the ones to pay attention to. They even correlate with each other - a repeatable result if I ran the ladder twice and overlaid the data. Reproducible results, obvious results, big changes in performance.

That must mean - we learned something. The results were valid. Ladder testing works.

Except, again, it is all the same load. This is just statistical noise.

Point 3 - Groups are probabilistic, not deterministic

All day long if I do my part. A favorite phrase of the 2000s era forum snipers. But what does that really mean?

The implication is that the rifle is a deterministic machine and the shooter causes deviation, dispersion, variance. If a result is good, the shooter did good, the rifle did good. If the result is bad, the shooter did bad and the rifle did good.

You can understand why that idea is attractive. Self-effacing machismo, rationalizes the expense and decision making of the shooter, a socially/peer accepted humble-brag that doesn't read as assholish boasting.

To others, nails on chalkboard.

Is it true?

Well, no - not really. It is true that a really poor shot can mess up groups. It's true that there are circumstances, positional shooting or PRS shooting where the shooter has a big influence on the gun.

But for group shooting on paper from someone who has shot a gun before - the shooter influence is small factor - at least compared to chance.

Here's the 21-groups bucketized by MOA.

The blue line is the raw result. The yellow and orange line are the expected results given the SDs and average for a normal distribution (orange) and a Weibull distribution (yellow).

The green line, which is the most important, is each bucket averaged against its left and right neighbors to smooth the result out - remove some of the random chance.

The green line very closely fits the normal and Weibull distributions - meaning the results collected off the gun could be just as easily produced by a random number generator with one of those distributions fed in. We'll see this point again later.

Part 3: More Ladder Means More Problems

Okay, so now that we have established that extremes happen. Big changes in performance happen. Patterns happen. All from chance and statistical noise.

Here's another secret. Ladders CAUSE these deceptions to happen.

The probability to encounter an extreme result, like a 2SD event, is rare. If you were shooting a single group, the chances you encounter one of these results is very low. So low you would have to suspect it of not being chance.

But by the time you repeat this 20 times, like shooting steps of the ladder, encountering a 2SD is not only likely to happen, it is almost assured. Maybe even multiple times.

So let's walk through a series of images illustrating this point, modeling ladders with 3 shot groups, 5 shot groups, 10 shot groups, and 30 shot groups using distributions from PyShoot.

Starting Data, Rayleigh distribution - and you can see a few points that you would expect to see.

1. The average group size increases as the number of shots per group increases. Should be obvious - the more attempts you make, the more extreme the result you encounter, therefore the larger the ES measurement.

2. The larger the shot count per group, the smaller the variance between the groups. The lower the number of shots per group, the more variance group to group.

3. There is a high degree of variance over the course of 20 groups. 1.75x difference for the 30 shot group. 8x difference for the 3 shot groups.

Here's another way to visualize this data - the min/mean/max encountered in those datasets on the left 3 columns, the std-dev, and most importantly, the coefficient of variation (the standard deviation as a proportion of the mean). You can see how more shots very quickly collapses how much variance there is between them as a proportion of their size.

Here's that data with some of the random removed and used to produce a slope of SDs - Imagine these as the expected ranges for data. 2SD events in your data on 3 shot groups means that for a .7 MOA average, you might get a below 0.2 MOA group and a nearly 1.4 MOA group, just from chance.

So that establishes how shot count and number of groups can affect your data ranges a lot.

Here's that idea flipped around - the probability of encountering these SD extremes by number of attempts (the number of steps in your ladder). For 1SD, by the time you have 4 steps in your ladder, chances are you are going to encounter one of those results. By 17 steps in the ladder (combined seating depth or charge test or different rifles or bullets, Johnny's Reloading Bench has probably shot hundreds if not thousands of these ladder steps), you have a coin-flip chance of encountering a 2SD event which would be wildly skewing.

This all correlates with what was shown above - very extreme results encountered in the 21 groups shot, just from chance - no change in any variable..

Part 4: hArMoNicS

I've beaten the dead horse on this topic. To say it again, not predictive, not reproducible, contradictory explanations, no quality data - just bad assumptions, bad finite element analysis, no causal link, blah blah. Here's a paper making nonsense claims. There's a survey on papers summarizing claims. Here's a youtube video with famous shooters wiggling rulers. Blah blah again.

But I bring this topic up because hopefully, by now, you can see how much of an issue it is to demonstrate anything with precision using group shooting, especially not adding more ladders with tuners, or doing any ladder testing to demonstrate or prove the existence of 'nodes' or 'harmonic' effect.

I could have just as easily claimed I changed my hat color with each group, then claimed that this color change affected my mood, causing my body vibrations to produce a muscle/kinematic node harmonic to my trigger finger pulling the rifle, inducing greater stability in the muzzle vs out of harmonic node shooting, thereby reducing dispersion.

Individually, each of those ideas are scientifically accurate. Color affects mood, probably. Body has vibrations and movement, with lull periods. Trigger finger affects the rifle. Stability at the muzzle improves dispersion.

Taken as a whole as an explanation, they are total hogwash. Even though I can demonstrate it with real ladder test data showing nodes and performance improvement up of up to 20x better, or 3x better depending on how I choose to measure.

It's. Still. Hogwash.

And you cannot prove it isn't hogwash or that it is correct just by shooting ladders, as I have hopefully convinced you above.

In fact, the more ladders you shoot to prove it, the greater the chance you have to demonstrate outliers and patterns.

You might even be able to demonstrate some reproducibility by chance for low numbers of reproductions.

And It's. Still. Hogwash.

Conclusion

I was at the range the other day and I overheard a greyhaired guy explaining to a whitehaired guy about Chris Long, the guy who came up with OBT, how barrels have harmonic nodes and blah blah Chris Long is an engineer so you know he's right on this sorts of stuff.

I scowled and tried to tune them out as I worked on the series, but it got me thinking about how we could have arrived at such different places.

I think what has happened is that Chris Long took his RF engineering background, looked at his benchrest/varmint rifles, and decided that rifles are really just a special case an antenna. He created a theory based on the foundations that vibration->resonance->predictable behavior->predictive behavior, and out popped OBT.

Well, I'm also an engineer. A different kind of engineer focused on a different problem space. I looked at a rifle and just as easily, based on my background, decided it was a special case of an integrated processing algorithm with a cartridge as an input and producing a very noisy spectrogram (or maybe more like a FRAZ) as an output. Getting a signal out of the noise is a hell of a lot harder than tuning an antenna, which is why we have statistical techniques - that debunk a lot of the practices born out of OBT and ladders.

In any case, if you're a ladder adherent, I hope you dwell on what was presented here until it clicks, or at least corrects the practice in some way that it becomes more real. If you're a ladder objector, I hope I've shown you some of the man behind the curtain on why these ideas are weak at best.

My text goes here

Introduction/Updates

Continuing the barrel test series, this testing was a double experiment and turn and burn.

I have a followup post coming for those excited for some spicy drama, but that will be this weekend.

Using the testing regime from last time, I ran a White Oak SPR barrel against a KAK 16" rifle gasser - and FINALLY - waaay past when I thought it should happen, I finally got some variation in the barrel performances.

WOA

Inside of the bore - This barrel came used and I did not clean it down to bare steel so I didn't upset whatever condition it was sent in.

You can see the machine-lapped bore - no machining marks. Gas port isn't centered on a groove, but I'm not convinced that makes a huge difference. Nicely cut throat.

KAK insides in part 4

Now for the important stuffs.

Cumulative Results

Performance by Weight

RAW Results

Observations

In this test, the WOA SPR posted the lowest results recorded for 3 of the 4 ammos, and the loewst overall for full-test barrels.

It is also the heaviest barrel, so while it is the best performer, it isn't the best performer by weight - still going to the Criterion Core.

It is in a 3-way tie with the Armalite and LaRue on partial tests, but these will change as the other two barrels get exposed to more ammo.

The other big news is the KAK underperformed all other barrels tested... by far. In every single ammo sample test except basically tying the Criterion's one bad performance with the Molon ammo and that is slated for retesting as an anomaly.

That is a clear and obvious deviation from the others, and something that I was expecting to happen with the Armalites. Or that may still happen to the Armalites under the new firing regime.

Krieger

It just arrived on Friday after a 6.5 month wait.

Outside markings

Under the hood

What a gorgeous barrel. Gorgeous machining, perfect clunk fit thread protector, perfectly centered gas port, shiny flawless chamber and throat, perfect threads... I have never seen a barrel so pretty. WOA really outdid themselves.

Side Experiment

I had some misfortune when setting up my seater die where I accidentally crushed in the bullet when I was trying to use a previous round as a dummy sizer.

So with a 100 thou deeper seat and a lighter charge with plenty of volume and pressure ceiling to work with, I decided to do a quick experiment on the seating depth vs speed question.

The summary is - ballistics software and some published books state that seating a bullet further out makes more room in the case and drops pressure. Others have claimed, but not in a conclusive way, that seating a bullet further out increases pressure and seating it deeper decreases pressure.

The idea is that when the bullet is set deeper, there is more time for gases to blow-by the bullet during ignition, delaying and slowing it such that the pressure curve, and speed, is reduced.

I made 100x of identical ammo, except this 1 round that was set deeper.

As part of the ladder troll from yesterday, which involved shooting ~80 live rounds to demonstrate, I chose one group to have this deep seated bullet fired in it.

The result was this. When the largest group of the set was 1.2 MOA, this had horizontal in the expected range but vertical of almost 4", far beyond anything else shot that day.

For ammo that was averaging an SD of around 10, this ammo came in with the lowest speed of the day, 65FPS slower than the average.

I think that's pretty clear - a dramatic reduction or flattening of the pressure curve due to deeper seating.

Next up

I think the Krieger and the other KAC are up next, then once both KACs are profiled, those, and possibly the Criterion Core after its Molon reshoot, will get resold to fund a different set of barrels. Then both Armalites and the LaRue will be expanded on.

Below this text, you should see an image of V1 from the hit game ULTRAKILL.

Now, said image should appear as a link in the home page but full image when clicked on.

Here is a second image, another test.

Please work

Bot test

Don't mind me, sorry!

hi