Sometimes you want to practice shooting at X distance but your facilities limit you to shooting at less than X distances. What can you do? You can scale your target to simulate the distance.

The formula looks like this:

(PTH / ATH) * DTS = DfPT

PTH – printed target height, inches

ATH – actual target height, inches

DTS – distance to simulate, yards

DfPT – distance from printed target, yards.

I became interested in how to do this because I have limited space in which to perform dry fire practice. Where I have things set up, I have at at most 2 yards physically from where I can hang a target. I wanted to practice things like shooting the head A-zone on an ISPC target at 15 yards… but what did that look like? Sure I could guess and just make a tiny target (aim small, miss small, right?), but I wanted something fairly accurate to scale because there’s utility in that. So I found this formula.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say I wanted to scale down an IDPA target, which is 30.75″ tall (30″ shootable area, but we’ll account for the border too). So that means the ATH is 30.75. I only have 2 physical yards in which to work, so my DfPT is 2. Let’s say I wanted to simulate shooting the target at 7 yards, so my DTS is 7. That means my PTH is 8.79″. What that allows me to do is go into a graphics app, scale down an IDPA target to 8.79″ tall (and we maintain proportions), and print it up with my inkjet printer on 8.5″x11″ paper at the correct height to simulate my situation.

Given this, you likely want the formula in this format:

(DfPT / DTS) * ATH = PTH

where you calculate for the printed height. Given my recent work with the F.A.S.T. drill and desire to work on the press out, I wanted to print up a scaled target. A little bit of math later, and I printed up a target that was scaled to 4″ high ( (2/7)*14). Simple!

No, it’s not perfect. There’s still some spatial issues that will mess with your eyes, and when it comes to longer distance shooting you lose factors like effects of wind, gravity and velocity loss (e.g. simulating 1000 yards at 100 yards just isn’t the same as really shooting at 1000 yards). But sometimes simulation is the best you can do.