I'm looking for recommendations for reticle for a Leupold VX5HD 3-15x44 to mount on a 300 win mag (Duplex, Windplex, HTMR, Illum FireDot Duplex, Boone & Crocket, Impact -29 MOA. I'm only looking for hunting purposes (elk) and anticipate a variety of shooting ranges from up close out to 400-500 yards. ......
As someone who grew up on simple cross hairs (and iron sights) too. I hear you. I am going to give you some advice you won't hear from others as well as some hard to understand technical info. But if you follow me, and understand my message, I think you will LOVE that advice.
I too am NOT a fan of making turret adjustments before a shot. Even if I have the time, it is a recipe for a fiasco in my mind. Almost all of my rifles have leupold scopes on them with ballistics reticles. I don't have to memorize anything.
First, you need to understand that leupolds ranging reticles (varmint and Boone & Crockett) are what I call scaleable reticles. They can be adjusted to match your bullets trajectory. I zero all my rifles at 200 yards. Then I shoot another group at 500 yards using THE CENTER CROSS HAIRS. Obviously, the group will be low. NOW COMES THE IMPORTANT PART:
Still holding the center cross hairs on the center of the target, adjust the scope's variable power ring until the 500 yard tick mark on the ballistics reticle coincides with your 500 yard group. (You can use 300, or 400 or 600 too, but I like 500.)
As if by magic, all the other tick marks will automatically line up with where groups at other ranges are. Perhaps not perfectly, but well within acceptable impact points for hunting purposes.
This magic happens because the reticles are ballistics reticles. And unbeknown to most shooters, ballistics are scalable. Leupold engineers understood this when they designed their ballistics reticles. Then the marketing guys got ahold of it and tried to over-simplify it with tables of groups of cartridges and velocities for each velocity mark on the adjustment ring. They successfully screwed it all up. But the good news is that it's easy to compensate. Just dial the power in to work for YOUR load and YOUR trajectory. Your power setting probably won't coincide with one of the two ballistics group triangles, but so what. Just remember what your adjustment is and you are good to go.
I marry a scope to each of my rifles for life, so I put a teeny tiny dab of my wife's red nail polish on the power rings for their load. If I have two loads for a given rifle, that have a big trajectory difference, then I put two marks on the power ring. It's easy to remember which one to use for which load. Faster always equates to using more magnification.
Once in a blue moon, I find an article describing this technique in more detail. But I think ballistics has been distorted into a black art by most people. It really need not be so complicated.
Here is my simple description. Bullet drop is all about time. TIME IS EVERYTHING. Every bullet of every shape, weight, and ballistics coefficient drops toward the ground at more or less exactly the same time in response to gravity. But initial velocity, ballistics coefficients and aiming angle all change how far it will go before that drop time occurs. Faster bullets only appear to drop less. But they really don't. They drop exactly the same amount in the same amount of time. They just go further in that same amount of time which makes them LOOK like they drop less. We humans have a hard time seeing the bullets flight in terms of elapsed time in fractions of a second. We prefer to use distance instead because we can see it and judge it more easily. But time is everything.
This fundamental science is what Leupold engineers understood and most shooters don't. And that is why I love Leupold's ballistics reticles such as the Boone & Crockett and the Varmint.