Turrets and reticles speak one of two angular units. Both scale perfectly with distance; the only wrong choice is owning gear that speaks both at once.
A scope correction is an angle, not a distance — dial 1 unit and the point of impact moves further the further away the target is. MOA (minute of angle) and MIL (milliradian) are just two different-sized units for slicing that angle.
A minute of angle is 1/60th of a degree — 21,600 of them in a circle. A milliradian is 1/1000th of a radian — about 6,283 per circle, so one MIL is roughly 3.4 times larger than one MOA.
| DISTANCE | 1 MOA | 1 MIL |
|---|---|---|
| 100 yd | 1.05″ | 3.6″ |
| 200 yd | 2.09″ | 7.2″ |
| 300 yd | 3.14″ | 10.8″ |
| 500 yd | 5.24″ | 18.0″ |
| 1000 yd | 10.47″ | 36.0″ |
MOA suits shooters who think in yards and inches — it dominates North American hunting scopes, and 1/4 MOA clicks are slightly finer than 0.1 MIL clicks. MIL dominates precision and tactical disciplines (PRS, NRL), pairs cleanly with metric thinking, and makes ranging and calling corrections between shooters faster. Neither shoots smaller groups. The deciding factor is usually what your gear — and the people you shoot with — already speak.
Turrets move in fractions of a unit: 1/4 MOA per click is standard (1/8 on competition glass, 1/2 on some hunting scopes), and 0.1 MIL per click is the near-universal MIL standard. Whatever the value, the arithmetic is the same — convert your measured miss to the unit, divide by the click value, dial.
Photograph your target and the analyzer measures your group and hands back the correction in MOA or MIL — already divided into clicks.