I went back and read Ted's post, and then page 117 in Vaughn's book, in case Ted had mis-typed things. Ted quoted it right. You misread. Engineering backgrounds don't solve that problem (In my youth, I was a recording engineer. Believe me, I do speak from experience). Vaughn's exact words:
How I read this is that as a barrel heats from firing rounds, problems appear. Your claim was that this level of heating doesn't occur in short or long range benchrest. My point was that if you fire a large long-range case like the 300 Ackley, it does. IIRC, you shot a small 6mm the couple of times you competed in 1K BR.
Now if you want to say that the occasional joint misalignment of the barrel and action, causing the scope to point to a relatively different point, is insignificant compared to the other things that can cause shot dispersion, that's different. But to make that claim, the dispersions would have to be quantified, a difficult task.
Most benchrest approaches are designed to eliminate potential problems rather than analyze their impact, because the sport is too small to interest anyone in getting statistically significant data for all of them. I believe Ted's point was this one's been swept under the rug, we simply assume it is too small to matter. To go from the assumption to a claim of fact is bad engineering. Yea, I've done that, too.
Just for one tiny data point, I have a rifle that solve this particular issue -- as I've said before, the scope is mounted on a barrel bock. Where ever the scope points, so too does the barrel. It has very few mystery shots. Proves nothing, suggests Vaughn might be on to a real-world issue as we get into the teen agg region.
