[Unclenick]

No problem. It was an opportunity to see the limitations of simplifying calculations, and to show the limitations of BC's taken with respect to reference projectiles that poorly match the shape of your bullet.

Re Handloader, Dave Scovill had to do what was necessary to keep Handloader alive. It turns out that means two things in the modern world: One is that the source of articles must be nearly free. What an editor can afford to pay a writer is a fraction, in dollars, much less in constant dollars, of what it was fifty years ago. Outside of full time employment by a gun rag publisher, the day when someone could make a living as a gun writer is dead. There will be no new Jack O'Connor (who quit teaching English to be a full-time outdoor writer because, in the 1940's, he could). Gun rag editors now depend a good deal on persons doing something for their own purposes to be willing to write it up and illustrate it for less than their time is worth at almost any other job. Almost certainly less than minimum wage, unless they can write really fast and fill most of the part of a page not jammed with ads with photos instead of writing.

Second, TV and Internet sources, like You Tube and even this kind of forum, have hit all print media hard by competing successfully for reader's leisure time and attention span limits. Modern readers often are those who grew up accustomed to communication consisting of pictures and superficial descriptions comprised of TV news vocabularies (about 5,000 words). Curiously, this means they've developed what I find to be an astounding tolerance for bad writing and video monologues that are run-on, hesitating, include wandering digressions, are accompanied by gratuitous narcissistic images of their authors shooting guns, and are, to me, flat out too boring to finish viewing. But they don't seem to exhibit the same tolerance for dry, but concise, technical writing. I don't know why; habit, perhaps. I just hope there are enough young people with enough curiosity about the technical minutiae to become the next generation of innovators.

The bottom line is, a gun rag editor has to publish superficial information with lots of pretty pictures. That's why Precision Shooting died. Handloader has not died, but not long ago I took a look at one of their two-article free issue previews. It consisted of one article extolling the virtues of the 6.5×55, with lots of photos and lots more advertising, and exactly one paragraph mentioning handloading for it, plus a very small table of load data. The second article was on .22 Rimfire rifles. .22 Rimfire? For a magazine called "Handloading"? Really? Obviously there was no handloading information there, either. But apparently that keeps the lights on.