Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Guns N Gear FFP vs. SFP Scope

I own a Ruger VLE in 308, not something I want to really hunt with but would like to get into long range shooting. My question is this, which do you prefer for long range shooting, First Focal Plane or Second Focal Plane, I am leaning towards SFP as the reticle will will stay the same size through magnification changes but to use say Mildot for ranging you have to have it on the mag setting as indicated by the manufacturer. On the other hand a FFP you can range estimate through all magnification settings but the cross hairs will grow and shrink depending. I know for years some of our military used a fixed 10X scope, not sure if that is still true but that might be the road to take. Right now I am looking at 600 yards max.

FFP for me on any long range scope. If you get one with a nicely designed reticle ,it won't be too thin at low power or too thick at high power. It's really nice to have an accurate measuring stick that you can use at any range and any power. FFP makes sighting in a 2 shot affair. I would want a FFP mill based reticle with mill based turrets if I intended to do any shooting where ranges would change often and I would need to dial.

There is not a cheaper and more durable and precise target scope made anywhere than the SWFA SS. I would highly recommend picking up a fixed 6X or 10X for less than $300 and playing with it for a while. Then you would have a much better idea of what you like and want,and you can sell the SWFA SS if you don't like it.

The 3-9X42 SWFA SS is an excellent hunting FFP scope also. It just costs a lot more than their fixed models. If you want the 3-9 SS, they are nearly half price on Black Friday every year.

FFP, with mil reticle and mil turrets. Milling with a scope is a skill that takes time and practice, which most shooters won’t worry with since LRFs are so prevalent. I would also stay away from MOA, a lot of MOA scopes have been dumbed down to 1 inch = 1 MOA. 1 MOA is 1.047 inches and the .047 with make a difference as you shoot further out. I walk, talk, measure and shoot in inches, feet, and yards. Mils still work for me. I just use the reticle as a ruler to measure misses. I don't worry about what unit I measure a miss. I just use the reticle (up/down, left/right), either hold or dial your correction and make a second round impact.

I started with a SWFA SS 20x scope with mil reticle and moa turrets. Even though I got the scope cheap I was money down the drain because it was too powerful for a good field of view and if I made a correction I had to do math in my head. That’s a no go when you’re on the clock or under pressure.


The 3-9 that RH mentioned is a good price to start at, the 3-15 SWFA is also in that same range. I personally don’t like the reticle for either scope but it takes time to figure out what you like. Athlon also has a few options in the under $700 price range that have been getting good reviews. GAP also has a sell on a Bushnell for $750-800 that is a steal. Someone else here purchased one of these recently.

I own one of each, both vortex scopes (4-14 max power), and both in MOA. Both with get the job done out to and past 1000 yds. You are correct... you do have to be on the highest mag in the SFP for the subtensions to be accurate with ranging or judging windage or elevation corrections.

I learned that even the nightforce and schmit and bender class scopes may not click to their specified click value ... and often times the movement will vary minute amounts depending on how far you are dialing (the closer to the extremes you get in the dials, the movement may be off more or less than when you are adjusting near the 'center' of the adjustment range). There is a correction for that when dealing with better ballistics apps and programs, but first you have to run the scope through it's paces from top to bottom and far right and left of it's adjustment ranges and test and put a number on that built in error (I forget what that test is called). I have not done that with mine, because that's an awful lot of work, and I'm not shooting for money or competition. I just dial my scope what the range card for that load and atmospheric conditions call for, and shoot. That usually gets me on steel (and usually pretty close), then I make any minor adjustments needed to get center, then record the dope in my shooting log for next time.

I don't know if I could suggest one over the other with the type of shooting/hunting I do. I believe the FFP would be better in pure hunting situations, because how often do you shoot in hunting situations with the scope dialed up to max magnification? I don't that often because where I hunt 200 yards is just about maxing my line of sight out. So I'm almost exclusively shooting at the scopes max magnification at the range when and where I'm wanting to use the subtensions. At the range, you know the yardages, and have all day to shoot... I can't say the same for hunting situations.

I started to write a complete dissertation on this but I think it will just confuse you at this point. When they started putting Mil Reticles in scopes I already knew the ballistics of a .30-06 so well you could holler out a distance and wind speed and I could just tell you the dope close enough to hit a man sized target out to 1k yards. The mil reticle was put into the scope for range estimation. Converting mils was easy for me because at that point we were talking about nothing but Kentucky Windage. That's all. When you cut through the crap that's really what we are talking about here. None of that is going to make much difference to you at known distances. Nobody is shooting at you... you have plenty of time to figure it out. A Mil/MOA scope just adds 1 step. Not hard, but also I would agree not necessary either and something like a hangover that can't seem to go away.


That being said you have received good advise.... Get a Mil/Mil reticle and if you get a fixed 10x or 12x SWFA SS the focal plane business is not an issue. That's plenty of magnification for 600 yards.

I don't think it makes a bit of difference in the real world none of us have something like a 800 yard zero dialed in on our rifle while hunting or at least I hope not.. I would zero my rifle for max point blank range either way. Meaning I wouldn't be shooting past 300 yards without the scope on max power regardless. Of course that's assuming max is where the manufacturer set the reticle if you are SFP .

See where I'm going there.

I prefer FFP myself more for low light advantages.... but a SFP scope is far from useless in this context.

You’ll spend more on AMMO just getting proficient past 600 with any of them. Just a thought.

Several times I've heard the guys from out west complaining that their SFP scope with some sort of ballistic reticle cost them an animal when they used the substentions thinking the scope was on max ,...but it wasn't.

If I had any kind of ballistic reticle at all I would want FFP. I would rather keep the reticle a simple plex or German #4 on a SFP scope.

Thanks fellas. I now have a lot more to think about with regards to trying my hand a long range shooting. I have a x9 scope now and I may take that to the range just to get an idea of how the target would appear at 600 yards. I do nto have the best eye sight, so it may be that I need a little more magnification than say x10 but I have never looked that far in a scope so I have not idea how my eyes would do.

The target design will matter a bit if you want precision at long range with lower power. If you can' look through some higher powered scopes at long range and see. Sometimes mirage is so bad you can't use a lot of magnification anyway.

Also keep in mind that you will buy a much much better quality scope in a fixed or even a 3-9 for a lot less money than you will buy equal quality glass in a 5-20 or such.

If you haven't looked at any before,I always thought the SWFA fixed glass was real close to Leupold VX2 quality. Their HD glass is close to VX3 and maybe a little better.

I completely disagree. You will spend a bunch on ammo, or in most case reloading to get the rifle shooting good at 100 yards. Once you know the velocity and BCs you can build a dope chart and either use the subtentions or dial for distance. I’ll bet a $100 that 70% of the guys on this site can hit a 1000 yard target, at least once out of three shots, IF the rifle and scope is set up correctly.

Shooting long distance is the easy part, getting the rifle and scope set up for it is the difficult part.

[/quote]Shooting long distance is the easy part, getting the rifle and scope set up for it is the difficult part. [/quote]

I can attest to this being closer to true than most think. I spent about 3 weeks working up handloads that consistently shot right at 0.75 MOA, and on good shooting days 0.5 MOA, and on exceptionally good shooting days, cloverleaves. Once that was accomplished, and a good muzzle velocity established for those particular rounds, all I had to do was plug and chug the required info into a ballistics calculator to develop a range card. I, having never shot much past 250 yards prior to that, promptly went to the range, and following the guide of the generated range card, shot almost uncannily well out to 500 yards by dialing the scope. A little more tweaking later, the next time at the range (and the first time ever shooting at 1K), I dialed the prescribed amount the card predicted, and hit 5 out of 6 on a man-sized silhouette target at 1000 with a lowly old 308 win. I was floored and elated at the same time.

If you find some good factory ammo with high BC bullets that will stay supersonic at 1000 (or ever how far you plan to shoot) that will shoot MOA (a little less would be better) with a good scope that is mounted exact with the action... in other words, the vertical crosshairs are exactly vertical when the gun action itself is perfectly square with the pull of gravity... your range card, developed by the specific bullet BC and actual muzzle velocity, will get you pretty darn close right off the bat. Or, at least, it has always been very close in my experience.

www.shooterscalculator.com/ballistic-trajectory-chart.php

I haven't found a phone app I like yet, but I use the above program to generate my range cards for every rifle and load I shoot. And it is surprisingly accurate.

I'm with joshm28. I have a rifle that anyone who can halfway shoot can easily ring steel out to 600, and have personally nailed targets out past 800 with a 50 year old hunting rifle in .30-06

Back before ballistic calculators you just wrote it on a card and taped it to the side of your stock or had a waterproof notepad with it all written down. Range Finders were the expensive thing. That sucker weighed about 25 pounds in the foam case and a good one was $1500. It looked like a LAW rocket launcher and you'd whip that thing out at the range and people would start backing up like you were about to send one down range. It was pretty funny but back then you didn't see people doing this stuff on any kind of regular basis. A good rifle would barely get MOA. If you were shooting .5MOA you had an almost unheard of piece of hardware on your hands.

You guys that are new to this have no idea how valuable a pocket sized lazer finder is or how easy this has all become for that matter. Still a lot of it is fluff. Several things seem standard that you really don't need to worry about to start shooting. All you really need is a scope that will track and an adequate rangefinder. After that everything else is just a convenience.

Yep....A $300.00 factory rifle today will shoot as good or better than a high dollar custom rifle from years ago.

Goatkiller and gundoc:

Both of my LR rifles are factory remmy varmint sps. Both I bought used for between $500 and $600, and both I tweaked handloads to get to shoot an occasional cloverleaf. I have been told that I've been spoiled by good quality factory rifles, and that back in the day, such a thing was very rare.