Stan;
I too enjoy discussing things of this nature as long as they are done civilly & will have to say I don't think I have ever discussed anything with you that did not remain civil. I do think though that if you digest all I have said its really not all that unexplainable.
Let me just give a quick recap to think on. In that 16-field pattern, I mentioned, for instance, the inner circle is 15" with an outer ring of 30". The inner ring thus has 1/4th the area of the entire circle. "IF" you fired a pattern which put 120 pellets in the 30" circle with a uniform pattern there would be 30 in the inner circle with 90 in the outer ring. This is not going to happen, there will always be central thickening. Now suppose we fired that pattern from a 12 gauge & it gave us 40 pellets in the inner ring & 80 in the outer. Perhaps then we fired it from a 28 & had 50 in the inner ring & 70 in the outer. Either of these would not be unusual. The 28 would actually have a slightly longer range, but the 12 would have a little bit larger killing circle.
These patterns would be rather typical using 3/4 oz of #6 lead shot.
Then from another aspect consider 1 1/8 oz in the 12 & 3/4 oz in the 28. 1 1/8 oz contains 50% more shot than 3/4 oz. It will not, however, increase the range by 50% but more on the order of 22˝%. Assuming similar patterns what 3/4 oz would do at 35 yards 1 1/8 oz would do at around 43 yards rather than 52˝ yards if it actually increased range proportional to the shot load.
The truly amazing part to me is that someone in a ballistics lab would find this "Unexplainable". Note that these yardages are not put forth as absolute limits, but merely as comparable ranges for the performance of the different loads.
