All About Riflescope Retcles
First Focal Plane:
First focal plane reticles are necessary if you want to use a reticle for estimating range to target and to be able to do so at any of the available magnification levels of your optic without having to take additional steps in the math or limitations such as setting the magnification to a specific level. FFP reticles are wildly popular in the tactical/tacticool/sniper/long-range worlds where you're shooting for hits rather than for X's. FFP scopes will be more expensive than second focal plane if that's the only difference between them. The reason is simple, another lens near the front of the scope. It's a small and necessarily finely crafted lens with an exactingly precise reticle etched into it and it's placed very far toward the front of the system of lenses by necessity.
Small things that are super finely crafted and placed deep inside complicated mechanisms are expensive. That's how making things works. The lines inside the reticle on a FFP scope are at precise angular distances from each other and can be placed over other elements in the image to compare angular size. If you know the angular size and the actual size of the thing you're looking at you can deduce how far away it is. When you increase magnification on an FFP scope the crosshair will appear to grow in direct proportion to the apparent size of the target.
At low magnifications a FFP reticle may be little more useful than a standard Duplex. At high magnifications it may occlude quite a lot of the image of the target. That's not going to be super helpful to people shooting for X's but it is a very fast way to range and hold-off and allows the shooter to rapidly engage targets using lower magnification or to precisely compensate for wind, movement, etc... without having to fuddle with turrets at higher magnifications.
Second Focal Plane:
Second focal plane reticles are desirable any time you want a fine reticle to stay one apparent size as magnification of the background image changes. It might seem odd to some reading this, but sometimes folks do want that feature. Because the lens is placed closer to the rear of the scope and not deep inside its guts there's typically a little more room for using a larger lens element, or even for just stringing a pair of wires across each other (some still do that).
Because it's SFP the lens element with the reticle can more durably be installed and it's easier to fabricate, easier to install and cheaper because of that.
Just because a scope is SFP doesn't mean it's not as good as a FFP scope. They have their purposes, each of them. Second focal plane scopes are extremely popular in target shooting applications where group size is measured and for hunting. If you're shooting for X's you're going to be best served by a SFP scope because it will obscure the least of the target at the higher magnification levels. SFP are more or less standard on hunting scopes as well though not by any means universal.
Reticle Layout:
Fine, Duplex, Post, Mil-Dot, Circle, Target Dot, Christmas Tree, Hunter Ranging, SVD or any of a hundred others. Which one is right for you? You want the least complicated reticle that can do the job you need it to do as a general rule. Below we'll introduce some common reticles and some not so common ones and give a brief blurb about common uses for each. This is by no means going to be comprehensive because much like a screwdriver handle occasionally will become a hammer, a target scope sometimes will get used for hunting. Neither works perfectly for off-book use cases but they can be made to work in a pinch.
Fine:
A fine crosshair is the simplest reticle that's in common use. Two fine lines are crossed to form the X or t or whatever letter you wanna call it. They're typically pretty fine and their width can be controlled by using wider or narrower wire to make them if using wire/hair/spiderweb. In low light situations these can be very difficult to see and if they're the old school type that are actually made of hair or spiderweb or wire then breakage is a concern (several people have debated me about this but the author has personally experienced this a number of times). Benchrest shooters, people shooting for X's and those shooting for group size will quite often choose this layout along with extremely high magnification as it obscures the least possible amount of the target so they can see their bullet holes, even from a great distance and even with very small bullets.
Duplex:
Duplex reticles are a fine-ish crosshair in the center that grows to be quite wide nearer the edges. The transition is normally abrupt with a very short angled taper. These are just about perfect for hunting non-dangerous big game with a rifle. Low light situations are helped by the wider lines and precision isn't hampered because the crossing lines are still fine. The thicker lines guide your eye naturally to the center so they'll much more easily pick up the fine hairs in low light. This is probably the most popular reticle in the USA and is used on the vast majority of hunting rifles that are equipped with a scope. Some companies have made FFP versions (the 30/30 reticle for example) but most are on SFP scopes.
German #3/Post:
Also called the German reticle, it provides a very open field of view with minimal stuff going on and is ideal for hunting dangerous game and was heavily used in early European scopes. The thick center vertical post is quick to pick up even in low light. The pointed top of the post allows combat sniping precision without a temptation for the sniper to spend too much time refining their aim point. The thick horizontal bars at the edges help the sniper avoid canting the rifle and the whole thing is easy to see in low light. The reticle is simple to make as etched reticles go and lacks ranging stadia.
For German snipers in WWII this was very effective. When hunting dangerous game or hunting in a dangerous environment the lack of extraneous markings makes for a high level of situational awareness and increased speed of use. Things don't always need to look fancy to be sophisticated. This reticle could be seen as the foundation of the much more sophisticated SVD type discussed further below though that's really more visual similarity than anything directly derivative.
Mil-Scale/Mil-Dot:
Scopes with reticles with miliradian subtends can be used very easily for range estimation and provide a brilliant method of fire correction. There are 2*Pi radians in a circle which isn't helpful for most people. In the interests of not making you do math, suffice it to say that for 1 radian there are about 57degrees of arc. That's a huge amount of arc so we cut it into 1000 little pieces which are very approximately .3 minutes of angle each (which works out to about .36 inches at 100yards). There are 60 minutes in each degree so we're talking about a very fine set of intervals which allows very small differences in target size to be helpful in estimating target range which makes for great precision.
Why not use minutes of angle? When using Mils/MRAD everything we do is in base10 and we tend to do it with metric measurements of the target and world which makes for easy math. Minutes of angle on the other hand uses base60 (thanks ancient fertile crescent residents for this hellish system of mathematics) and the SAE measurement system (feet/inches) is base12. Base60 and base12 are compatible in places (12*5=60 right) but they're not easy to mix in your head and few of us have 12 fingers to count on to help.
Scopes with their reticles in mil-scale and with mil-scale turrets (or with MOA scale reticles and matching MOA turrets but, that's another section) make fire corrections ridiculously simple, especially if you use metric linear measurements for target size and range. With a scaled reticle like these and turrets in MRAD you can watch where your bullet landed, measure it in the reticle, adjust exactly that much up/down/left/right and fire. There's no converting to or from minutes of angle and no guesswork about actual inches and subsequent division to do to figure out how many clicks to adjust. Scopes with mil-scale reticles are wildly popular in many forms of shooting including PRS, Long Range Tactical, 3-Gun, etc… as well as with tactical/SWAT units of police departments and military snipers.
MOA-Scale:
This is more or less the same as a mil-scale but instead of using miliradians they will use minutes of angle or some fraction thereof. All the same basics in use case apply from mil-scale to moa-scale. There are reasons to use a MOA-scale reticle and it's entirely probable that if you need one, you know it and know why, otherwise it's just a preference issue.
There is also a sub-type of MOA scale which is not literally MOA: IPHY or inch per hundred yards. 1MOA is 1.05 (or 1.09 depending on how you measure) inches at 100 yards. Because different scope companies have different ideas of how to measure 1MOA, some companies decided to say the heck with it and adopted another system which is exactly 1 inch at 100 yards. The math is much easier to do in your head without extraneous decimal places in the significant digits.
While IPHY is by definition not MOA it's very very similar. Both have smaller linear distances covered at any distance than MRAD with IPHY having the smallest subtended linear distance. The small value lends itself to a smaller click value and the ability to dial more precise adjustments. For target shooters an IPHY scale may make sense. For those that just can't grok the metric system of linear measures, the MOA scale is probably up your alley (though you should really learn the metric system for your own benefit) and if MOA is too much of a pain, IPHY makes a good fist of simplifying it.
First focal plane reticles are necessary if you want to use a reticle for estimating range to target and to be able to do so at any of the available magnification levels of your optic without having to take additional steps in the math or limitations such as setting the magnification to a specific level. FFP reticles are wildly popular in the tactical/tacticool/sniper/long-range worlds where you're shooting for hits rather than for X's. FFP scopes will be more expensive than second focal plane if that's the only difference between them. The reason is simple, another lens near the front of the scope. It's a small and necessarily finely crafted lens with an exactingly precise reticle etched into it and it's placed very far toward the front of the system of lenses by necessity.
Small things that are super finely crafted and placed deep inside complicated mechanisms are expensive. That's how making things works. The lines inside the reticle on a FFP scope are at precise angular distances from each other and can be placed over other elements in the image to compare angular size. If you know the angular size and the actual size of the thing you're looking at you can deduce how far away it is. When you increase magnification on an FFP scope the crosshair will appear to grow in direct proportion to the apparent size of the target.
At low magnifications a FFP reticle may be little more useful than a standard Duplex. At high magnifications it may occlude quite a lot of the image of the target. That's not going to be super helpful to people shooting for X's but it is a very fast way to range and hold-off and allows the shooter to rapidly engage targets using lower magnification or to precisely compensate for wind, movement, etc... without having to fuddle with turrets at higher magnifications.
Second Focal Plane:
Second focal plane reticles are desirable any time you want a fine reticle to stay one apparent size as magnification of the background image changes. It might seem odd to some reading this, but sometimes folks do want that feature. Because the lens is placed closer to the rear of the scope and not deep inside its guts there's typically a little more room for using a larger lens element, or even for just stringing a pair of wires across each other (some still do that).
Because it's SFP the lens element with the reticle can more durably be installed and it's easier to fabricate, easier to install and cheaper because of that.
Just because a scope is SFP doesn't mean it's not as good as a FFP scope. They have their purposes, each of them. Second focal plane scopes are extremely popular in target shooting applications where group size is measured and for hunting. If you're shooting for X's you're going to be best served by a SFP scope because it will obscure the least of the target at the higher magnification levels. SFP are more or less standard on hunting scopes as well though not by any means universal.
Reticle Layout:
Fine, Duplex, Post, Mil-Dot, Circle, Target Dot, Christmas Tree, Hunter Ranging, SVD or any of a hundred others. Which one is right for you? You want the least complicated reticle that can do the job you need it to do as a general rule. Below we'll introduce some common reticles and some not so common ones and give a brief blurb about common uses for each. This is by no means going to be comprehensive because much like a screwdriver handle occasionally will become a hammer, a target scope sometimes will get used for hunting. Neither works perfectly for off-book use cases but they can be made to work in a pinch.
Fine:
A fine crosshair is the simplest reticle that's in common use. Two fine lines are crossed to form the X or t or whatever letter you wanna call it. They're typically pretty fine and their width can be controlled by using wider or narrower wire to make them if using wire/hair/spiderweb. In low light situations these can be very difficult to see and if they're the old school type that are actually made of hair or spiderweb or wire then breakage is a concern (several people have debated me about this but the author has personally experienced this a number of times). Benchrest shooters, people shooting for X's and those shooting for group size will quite often choose this layout along with extremely high magnification as it obscures the least possible amount of the target so they can see their bullet holes, even from a great distance and even with very small bullets.
Duplex:
Duplex reticles are a fine-ish crosshair in the center that grows to be quite wide nearer the edges. The transition is normally abrupt with a very short angled taper. These are just about perfect for hunting non-dangerous big game with a rifle. Low light situations are helped by the wider lines and precision isn't hampered because the crossing lines are still fine. The thicker lines guide your eye naturally to the center so they'll much more easily pick up the fine hairs in low light. This is probably the most popular reticle in the USA and is used on the vast majority of hunting rifles that are equipped with a scope. Some companies have made FFP versions (the 30/30 reticle for example) but most are on SFP scopes.
German #3/Post:
Also called the German reticle, it provides a very open field of view with minimal stuff going on and is ideal for hunting dangerous game and was heavily used in early European scopes. The thick center vertical post is quick to pick up even in low light. The pointed top of the post allows combat sniping precision without a temptation for the sniper to spend too much time refining their aim point. The thick horizontal bars at the edges help the sniper avoid canting the rifle and the whole thing is easy to see in low light. The reticle is simple to make as etched reticles go and lacks ranging stadia.
For German snipers in WWII this was very effective. When hunting dangerous game or hunting in a dangerous environment the lack of extraneous markings makes for a high level of situational awareness and increased speed of use. Things don't always need to look fancy to be sophisticated. This reticle could be seen as the foundation of the much more sophisticated SVD type discussed further below though that's really more visual similarity than anything directly derivative.
Mil-Scale/Mil-Dot:
Scopes with reticles with miliradian subtends can be used very easily for range estimation and provide a brilliant method of fire correction. There are 2*Pi radians in a circle which isn't helpful for most people. In the interests of not making you do math, suffice it to say that for 1 radian there are about 57degrees of arc. That's a huge amount of arc so we cut it into 1000 little pieces which are very approximately .3 minutes of angle each (which works out to about .36 inches at 100yards). There are 60 minutes in each degree so we're talking about a very fine set of intervals which allows very small differences in target size to be helpful in estimating target range which makes for great precision.
Why not use minutes of angle? When using Mils/MRAD everything we do is in base10 and we tend to do it with metric measurements of the target and world which makes for easy math. Minutes of angle on the other hand uses base60 (thanks ancient fertile crescent residents for this hellish system of mathematics) and the SAE measurement system (feet/inches) is base12. Base60 and base12 are compatible in places (12*5=60 right) but they're not easy to mix in your head and few of us have 12 fingers to count on to help.
Scopes with their reticles in mil-scale and with mil-scale turrets (or with MOA scale reticles and matching MOA turrets but, that's another section) make fire corrections ridiculously simple, especially if you use metric linear measurements for target size and range. With a scaled reticle like these and turrets in MRAD you can watch where your bullet landed, measure it in the reticle, adjust exactly that much up/down/left/right and fire. There's no converting to or from minutes of angle and no guesswork about actual inches and subsequent division to do to figure out how many clicks to adjust. Scopes with mil-scale reticles are wildly popular in many forms of shooting including PRS, Long Range Tactical, 3-Gun, etc… as well as with tactical/SWAT units of police departments and military snipers.
MOA-Scale:
This is more or less the same as a mil-scale but instead of using miliradians they will use minutes of angle or some fraction thereof. All the same basics in use case apply from mil-scale to moa-scale. There are reasons to use a MOA-scale reticle and it's entirely probable that if you need one, you know it and know why, otherwise it's just a preference issue.
There is also a sub-type of MOA scale which is not literally MOA: IPHY or inch per hundred yards. 1MOA is 1.05 (or 1.09 depending on how you measure) inches at 100 yards. Because different scope companies have different ideas of how to measure 1MOA, some companies decided to say the heck with it and adopted another system which is exactly 1 inch at 100 yards. The math is much easier to do in your head without extraneous decimal places in the significant digits.
While IPHY is by definition not MOA it's very very similar. Both have smaller linear distances covered at any distance than MRAD with IPHY having the smallest subtended linear distance. The small value lends itself to a smaller click value and the ability to dial more precise adjustments. For target shooters an IPHY scale may make sense. For those that just can't grok the metric system of linear measures, the MOA scale is probably up your alley (though you should really learn the metric system for your own benefit) and if MOA is too much of a pain, IPHY makes a good fist of simplifying it.
- Next page: All About Riflescope Reticles
- Previous page: Overview
