THE SOLANO TARGET.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12502, 1 April 1909, Page 1

THE SOLANO TARGET.

Is the bull's eye doomed? A heavj' blow has certainly been struck at it by the War Office's adoption of- the Solano "target (says the "Press"). The Solano system begins by discarding the circular bull's eye. Targets are either triangular or rectangular. Experience shows that if a rifleman wants to hit an advancing infantryman he should practice at a triangular target, so that the elenientary target in the system is a triangle of blurred liries On a back ground of grey and brown. To represent ar battery of artillery crossing the line of fire a long narrow target is used. But the most interesting part of the system is something more elaborate. It is a target consisting of four tiers ,_ plated ' with sheet iron. Over these tiers are laid strips of canvas representing different tjipes of landscape, and behind is canvas .{backed with iron plating) representing the sky. Along each of the tiers runs a groove, and .in the groove runs a carrier, in which can be^ set targets representing any arm of the service. The grooves are calculated to be set certain distances from the firing point, twenty-five feet - away, ranging from four, hundred to a thousand yards. That is to say the targets are exactly the size which a real infantry man or artillery man would be like to a man four hundred, or a thousand or tvto thousand yards away. From the firing point the figures are made to cross the. firing line at justthe pace they would move at in real life. . There are three sizes, of targets for each tier, so that the rifleman is afforded fine practice in judging distance. Both the minature rifle and the service weapon can be used with this ingenious contrivance. "Match rifle conditions and bull's eye shooting are directly opposed to service rifle shooting and training for war," says a British expert in musketry. "If Bisley shooting is to be in the future, as it used to De forty years ago, a valuable form of training for shooting in war, clearly the bull's eye target must disappear from Bisley as well as from the Regular Army course of musketry instruction. Its place' must be - taken by targets approximating in col- | our, size, and character to marks actually shot at in battle."