The information I'm going to share in this post really made me excited when I discovered it. A few months back, I started testing 215gr Berger Hybrids in my .308 Norma. I used my traditional load development of finding a velocity node and then fine tuning it to get low ES and SDs. Pictures 1, 2, and 3 show charge weights that I shot purely for group size, shape, and point of impact in the past couple weeks. You can see that 70.7 and 70.8 are very tight groups and both hit very close to center. The 70.9 load wasn't as good but impacted roughly 1/2" from the center of the other two loads. This is what I would call the Optimal Charge Weight. I found these loads without any use of a chronograph. I purely went off group size, shape, and point of impact as I said before. Now let's go back to that velocity testing I did in the past. In picture 4 you can see my velocities from 70.2 to 70.8 were very tight with an ES of 18 across that span of charge weights. All of the data so far I have shared has been with brand new brass. I then tested the velocities in once fired brass because once fired brass always delivers more velocity grain per grain than virgin brass. As you can see in pictures 5 and 6, I tested 70.0, 69.7, and 69.5 all for velocity. The average velocity for all three loads was 2917 and the ES from the slowest (2902) to fastest velocity (2936) across all three charge weights was 34 FPS. That's an ES of 34 with charge weights varying 0.5gr of powder! That is a very good node. Now to wrap all of this up, my optimal charge weight was 70.7-70.8gr of powder in virgin brass. Going back to my initial velocity testing, 70.8 did 2916FPS. Looking at my once fired velocity tests, the average of all three combined charge weights was 2917FPS. The OCW method and the velocity node method both landed me on the exact spot. That is some very interesting and conclusive evidence if I do say so myself!