Looks like the new ISSF rules for 2009 will contain a few doozies. Centrefire shooters are a bit annoyed at the reduction of trigger weight to 1000g (there’s some concern about how well trigger mechanisms optimised for 1400g would work at 1000g). But the one that’s really going to kick up dust looks to be the use of the number of inner tens shot as the first mechanism for breaking ties, relegating countback to second place.
I mean, I can see the sense in it. It can be argued that someone with more inner tens shot the better match (just as it can be argued that the shooter who chokes within sight of 600 on the last few shots isn’t the better shooter and shouldn’t win). The problem is in implementation – right now the electronic target systems don’t do tiebreaks this way, so that’s a software update no matter if you’re on Suis Ascor or Megalink. That’s not a huge deal I suppose. Those with electronic scoring machines will need a firmware upgrade and a software upgrade for their shotsoft3000 program (or whatever they’re using) though – that’s slightly more of a big deal, since you’d probably have to ship the scoring machine around to get the firmware upgraded.
The real pain will be those folks still scoring by hand though, which I’m guessing is the majority of people. For 50m it’s okay, you have the gauges – but for 10m air rifle, there is no such thing as an inner ten gauge in production yet. There’s the decimal gauge, but that’s slow to use and a bit fiddly, and not many clubs will actually have them. Countback was much easier to tiebreak for manual scorers, as you didn’t have to gauge tens – now every shot that does more than barely clip the ten will have to be gauged, or you’ll have to go back and re-gauge them in the event of a tie. Which means more time, which means more delays, which means more of a pain in the fundament.
Gah. And this is due in in 7 weeks and it’s not even up on the ISSF website yet, it’s just being talked about online. Daft, daft, daft.