CMP E-Targets in Talladega Range Report

I attended the CMP's Talladega 600 last week with another Bullseye newbie and wanted to post some thoughts and observations due to all of the discussion on the forum here in recent weeks/months.

I really like the Talladega facility. It's very well laid out, the staff was very friendly and helpful, and the place is of course immaculate. We were only able to shoot during the matches themselves unfortunately as the ranges were closed all week except during the matches. Compared to other public type ranges I've used, the fees for paying for use by a full day or half day would be well worth it.

There's pretty much nothing in Talladega itself, so we made the 20-ish minute each way drive for lunch in Anniston since we didn't pack lunches. My bud's parents live about 90 minutes away, so we were able to stay there for free and commute there and back every day.

My less than 6 months of Bullseye experience consisting of only shooting two full 2700s, a 900, one 22 EIC and a Service Pistol EIC, all at Mid-Carolina Gun Club. I suppose its safe to say I'm used to the turning targets. The pistol targets have a green light and a red light, and instead of turning, part of the range commands are to fire when the green light appears, at the same time the red light disappears. There is a target at 50yds and one at 25yds on the 50-yd pistol range. They lay down when not in use. I noticed when I was verifying for another shooter that there was a small 5-sec countdown on the monitor at the bench before the light would turn to green, but I didn't see anyone on the firing line looking at it.

Talking to a few of the more Bullseye experienced shooters there, they much preferred the turning targets especially since it gives you the ability to start breaking the shot with the target turning. There's obviously no way to game that with the light system. These target systems monitors do indicate the level of scoring ring as well, ie a 9.6 or an X.4 depending on the position of the hit inside the scoring ring. For the different calibers, I'm only aware of 22, 9mm and 45 options being in the system. The ROs went down the line to ensure each competitor indicated their correct caliber in the monitor at every yardage change so the scoring would be correct. From what I read and heard before, this was an issue at the Inaugural Matches months ago but it appears to be fixed now.

I only saw two issues with the pistol matches. One was that the Distinguished shooter I was verifying for was called for a late shot (in the Service Pistol EIC) by the booth. Both he and I disagreed with that call, so the RO checked the system and the bullet actually hit the target in rapid fire at 9.97 seconds but was still scored as a late hit. Because there was in fact 0.03 seconds left the call was reversed and he was able to have that shot count. The RO said there was some sort of buffer built into the system for when exactly a late hit could be recorded but there were 2 of the Kongsberg techs in the booth and I know they made some sort of adjustment to the settings at that point.

The second issue I saw with pistol was that when there was a gun malfunction delay between two of the 5-round strings in timed fire, by the time the second string was over the first 5 shots disappeared from the all firing point monitor hit lists. (This happened once for rifle as well due to a similar delay). We had to leave the first 5 shots blank and the booth filled them in based on the electronic hits. Ultimately the electronic scoring was king and the paper scoring sheets were used as a backup for the electronic system.

In addition, when the RO calls the cease fire it might not be the instant the red light illuminates. You must still subconsciously pay attention to the red light or possibly have a late hit. There were several that had legitimate late hits, but it generally seemed to be the new-ish shooters.
The only disputed miss I saw was on the rifle line. During the line change CMP made the line safe and then sent a couple of staff members down to the target in a golf cart to check the backing. I can't remember if they said it was regular cardboard or something else, but they did in fact find a hole from a very wild shot that didn't even register in the system.

At the end of each match for both 22 EIC and Service Pistol, we had to paste over the hits in the center white section as they were not self healing. They are replaced from time to time but I don’t know the frequency. The black bullseye section is a piece of rubber that gets manually advanced when needed, and the outermost portion outside the usual square target was some sort of white lexan looking material that also had some fired holes in each one. Any one component of the target system can quickly be changed out in case of failure and didn’t cause much downtime.

The owner and several techs from Kongsberg targets were on site (ie, actually in the booths) the entire week to make sure everything went smoothly. The CMP kept stressing that as their biggest customer, Kongsberg is doing everything they can to ensure these target systems are working as well as possible. I saw no reason to doubt that. The CMP and the Kongsberg techs were actively soliciting feedback from shooters on how improvements can be made, and there was no hint of "this is how it is, so deal with it" like some seem to think.

The CMP had a take-down display model of the target system in one of the classrooms and explained how it is built. Like I mentioned, each component can be changed out as needed. The biggest issue was that on the rifle line at either 200 or 300 yds during a match someone managed to hit a shielded communication cable that fed data between several targets. All these targets (4 or 5 I think) went down due to the very bad shot and hit, so those individuals all had to re-fire their remaining strings on other targets.

I'm no expert on this system but do have a week of experience with them now. If anyone has any specific questions I'll do my best to answer them.

Question, do you have a copy of the match bulletin?
What rules were used for these matches?
You said that the Tech's tweeted settings during the match, correct?

Regular guy,
You do realize, there are no rules covering the use of e-targets being used for EIC matches.

Dane, the only change to the rules can be found on this page for "Electronic Scoring Targets" here:
http://thecmp.org/competitions/cmp-competitions-rulebooks/

The match bulletin is here under Official Program:
http://thecmp.org/competitions/matches/talladega-600/

They also included a paper copy of the electronic scoring targets rules in each competitors folder during check-in. I looked in the paperwork I've got and there was nothing else included in the way of rules or anything (besides the two CMP paper rule books).

The techs did make adjustments but I don't know what all they did or when they did it.

It must be expensive to have 2 guys from Norway around every time you want to shoot a match.  Thanks for the first hand information about the system.  I plan on getting down there next year to check it out myself.  Considering the time it is taking to have a permanent dedicated E range debugged, which I believe they eventually will accomplish, I still can't see this working when it has to be put up and taken down every year in a tornado zone lashed by lightening on a regular basis.

RG, thank you for the links.
My point is the the E-target rules are still provisional. And have not been approved by the rules committee.
The match bulletin has a link to the current 2015 rulebook which contradicts the provisional electronic target rules.

Regular Guy - Thanks for a real world report. Far better info than all the speculation we see in other topics. 

I know you are fairly new, but I'm really curious about the pace of the match compared with paper targets. How long were the shooters given between targets? How long did it take to complete a match?

Steve, since there were only EICs and not 2700s the pace seemed to be a bit quicker than using the manual turning targets. I think this was mainly from not having to go down to paste/score after each string or to move the target frame from 50 to 25. There was a few minute delay between slow fire and timed due to the targets pivoting up and down, but the delay between timed and rapid was pretty short. There was more than enough time to stuff the mags and the verifiers to record the score, and then it started. I didn't feel rushed at any point.

The Service Pistol EIC was billed to start at 2:30, and I think I was on the road about 4pm after BS-ing with a lot of the other shooters there. The match probably lasted about an hour with only 2 relays.

Hi Steve,
I was there for the 22 EIC match only (crazy to drive 12+ hours one way for a 30 shots match, but it was fun)... There were some "strange" things at this match - a shooter was allowed a double alibi, the 45 degree rule in timed and rapid was not strictly enforced, the late shots in rapid fire were announced as late by tower over the radio but were shown as non-zero on the monitors, lots of time was wasted between timed and rapid strings of the first relay (people were sent down the range to patch the targets). Many of these issues were just human errors (the person calling the line does need much more practice) and will go away as the staff running the matches gains more experience. One of the concerns is that the target frames were already shot-up pretty badly and may not last long if they allow beginner shooters with large calibers (e.g. in Ft. Benning second frame hit results in disqualification).

The extra rules for electronic targets are available at http://thecmp.org/wp-content/uploads/ESTScoringRules.pdf - the guy who gave us the mandatory safety training mentioned that the main concern addressed by these rules is not the actual target malfunctions, but lack of trust in electronic targets from the shooters.

-Anatoly