[zippy13]

Originally Posted by Hawken1911

Perhaps because with muzzleloading there are so many combinations of bullets/balls and powder/pellet types that it's not practical.

Yes, it's not practical to provide specific flight data because of the many variables; but, they can give you the weight and ballistic coefficient of the bullet. If B.L.E. had that info, your chronographed velocity, and your height of sights, then he could have fed in into his ballistics calculator and given you some meaning full data and a chart of the sight line and bullet's path showing the points of intersection. Following the chart you'd know how hight, or low to hold at any range or the sight adjustments to make. Adding real time shooting environment data increases accuracy.

Then there's the pre computer old school method: If you have a Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook like mine, there's pages and pages of trajectory data for each of their cast bullets at 100fps increments. You select the bullet flight data appropriate to your load and plot the curve on graph paper. Then you draw a straight line of sight, based on the height of your sights and the range you set your sights to zero. Like the computer generated chart, you now know what adjustments to make at various ranges.

Those who've done this with any regularity have noticed that the higher the sights are above the bore, the greater the horizontal distance between the points where the sight line intersects the bullet's path. What this does is to artificially flatten your trajectory with respect to your sights. This means you have a better chance of keeping your hits within a kill zone without adjusting your sights or aim point.

When old school shooters went from iron to optical sights not only did they take sight alignment out of the equation, the extended point blank range (because of the higher sights) rewarded them with higher killing hit ratios. It's one of the reason modern battle rifles have optical sights or elevated open sights. Until you understand the relationship between sight line, path of bullet and zero range, you're shooting in the dark.

If all I've done is to add confusion to the darkness, may I suggest you download a ballistic program. Play around with the sight height and zero distance changes (using the same bullet) and observe what happens with the correction offsets -- you'll soon see the light.