What is a mil dot scope?
To answer that, we first have to know what a mil is. A mil dot reticle does not refer to the military. The MIL in mil dot is a shortening of the term milliradian. You are familiar with degrees as measurements of angle. You also know from high school geometry that there are 360 degrees in a circle. As the circle grows larger in circumference, the number of degrees does not change, but the distance between each degree along the circle does increase. You may also know that degrees are divided into smaller units called minutes. There are seconds, too, but they are too small for this discussion. A degree is divided into 60 minutes. At 100 yards distance, the angle of one minute is approximately one inch. So if the centers of the two bullets farthest apart in a 100-yard group are about one inch apart, we call that a minute-of-angle group. Get it? At 200 yards, a group measuring two inches center- to-center equals a one minute-of-angle group. At 400 yards, it’s a four-inch group. At 50 yards,
