Dot Torture

Dot Torture is a diagnostic sheet, not a workout. Ten dots, fifty rounds, no clock — it tells you whether you can press the trigger without moving the sights, and nothing at all about speed, transitions or recoil control. Shoot it cold, score it honestly, then go fix what it found somewhere else.

Dot size in inches and in MOA

Each dot is 2.00 in / 50.8 mm measured to the outside of the printed ring; the ring band is about 1 mm wide, so score to the outer edge. Ten dots, laid out 1-3-3-3.

At the 3-yard working distance a 2.00 in dot subtends 63.7 MOA. At 7 yards it is 27.3 MOA (1 MOA = 1.047 in at 100 yd, so the figures reproduce on a calculator). Sixty-three MOA is an enormous target, which is the point: nothing about the dot is hard. What is hard is that the standard applies to all fifty rounds, including the one-handed strings, and one miss ends the run.

Print at 100%, then measure one dot

Here the scoring zone is the dimension, so scale error is score error. Set the dialog to 100% or Actual Size, turn off Fit to Page, then measure the bar in the footer of the first sheet: exactly 1.000 in / 25.4 mm in the file. If the bar reads short, every dot on the page is short by the same percentage; the calibration test sheet settles it once.

A4 and US Letter — both 1:1

Both files carry the same 2.00 in dots. What changes is the spacing: US Letter is 17.6 mm shorter than A4, so the gap between rows drops from 6 mm to 2.5 mm to keep four rows on the page. The dots never shrink — a 2-inch dot is the drill, and the whitespace is what gives way.

That matters because most printable targets ship in Letter only. An A4 file sent to a Letter tray with fit-to-page on scales to 94.1% — six percent short, which turns a 2.00 in dot into 1.88 in. A Letter file on A4 scales to 97.3%. Neither is the drill everyone else is scoring, and neither looks wrong on the page. Print the file matching the paper in your tray.

The drill, and the lighter version

Which string goes on which dot, and the rule that decides when you move back — on the Dot Torture drill page.

When fifty rounds is more than the session justifies, Dot Torture Lite is the closest sheet we have: four dots in a 2×2 grid, twenty rounds, identical 2-inch geometry, so a clean run means the same thing at a fifth of the ammunition.