Originally Posted By: BrentD
Originally Posted By: Rocketman
Good post, Miller. Glad to hear you are feeling up to some shotgun research. Have you read "Performance of Sporting Shotguns" by Dr. Andrew Jones? He answers a lot of questions.

Shotgun patterns follow a Rayleigh distribution, which can be nicely approximated with a normal distribution. The Rayleigh distribution describes rifle groups, artillery fire, and bombing patterns, also.


Thanks for saying that. I don't believe I have ever heard another shooter actually mention ANY statistical distribution, much less the correct one. I approximate that with a bivariate normal distribution - simply because I've never found a proper transformation function for the Rayleigh. For most purposes the bv normal is close enough when testing rifles for precision. I'm afraid I have never done any statistical analyses of shotgun patterns - though maybe I should.


I quite agree with you on the bv normal as acceptable. Please, read Jones. He did a huge experiment. IMO, we can hardly overstate the difference between his work and others to date. Please, please, please do some experiments with 10 pattern groups and proper statistics. We need no more junk experiments and much more real data.

DDA