Lets do a little ciphering. Ciphering is fun. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the best qualified to take this problem on, but I'll start it and wait for Don or someone almost as smart to come along and bail me out.
Here goes...
Let us assume we have an exellent shotgun, one with almost mythical shooting properties. Instead of patterning at 40 yards, we are going to pattern at 120 yards.
For the sake of simplicity and best case scenario, we are going to assume conical pattern spread, and our superb gun will print 100% patterns in a 30 inch circle at 40 yards. I said it was a good gun.
At 120 yards, our perfect pattern has spread to 90 inches. Assume it's still 100%, and fully half of the shot charge charge is in the central 45 inch 'core'. What a gun!
Using English 5's at 220 per ounce, given the above wonderful performance, how often will we hit a clay target in that 45" central 'core' - where Mr. Digweed will always put it?
We'll take a Springing Teal target, face on at 14.5 square inches. The area of the central 45 inch pattern core is 2826 square inches. Dividing, we get 194 clay target areas in this core. Shooting an ounce and a quarter of English 5's would mean half of them work out to 138 pellets.
Thus, two thirds of the time given this best case scenario we can expect to put a hole in a target. One hole.
Somebody else can work retained energy and velocity, and likelyhood of multiple pellet hits to assure destruction of the target.
Remember, this is a mythical close shooting gun given conical pattern spread and a 100% pattern. Real world will be somewhat worse than this, perhaps much worse.
