Two Guns, Twice The Fun: We Shoot the Inaugural Dual Platform Sniper Challenge Match

Here at RECOIL, we’re always on the lookout for new ways to pull triggers with good people. So when a buddy mentioned he was heading to Gunsite in Paulden, Arizona, to take part in a competition we’d never heard of, we figured it was worthy of attention.

The Dual Platform Sniper Challenge is the brainchild of Josh Reeves. While standing in the Gunsite parking lot delivering the match briefing, he explained the reason it came into being. “This is a match I’ve wanted to shoot for a long time, and no one else was running it, so I just said “F*ck it, I’ll put it on myself’.” And isn’t that how all the best ideas get brought to reality?

The match’s premise is fairly simple, testing competitors on speed and accuracy with both a carbine and precision rifle in field conditions, or as close as possible in a range environment. 

According to the brief:

“The DPSC is a new match concept that combines gas gun speed with bolt gun accuracy, taking aspects from Accurized AR, PRS, Mammoth, and NRL Hunter to make a fun and extremely challenging competition.

RIFLE: Any 243/6mm up to .30 Cal. 3,000-fps limit. Limited round count stages. Targets between 400 and 1,200 yds (movers and static)

CARBINE: 3,200-fps limit. UNLIMITED round count stages. Small frame only. Targets between 5 and 400 yards. 

Expected round count for the match. Carbine 200 and Rifle 80 should be enough to complete all stages and still have a few extra.

Shooters can use any ancillary equipment if such equipment is carried during every stage. Gear left behind will be considered destroyed and unable for use for the remainder of the match.

Competitors will carry both firearm platforms throughout the course of fire. All gear will be stowed to start with both systems unloaded. Upon completing the first weapon system portion that weapon will be cleared before moving to the 2nd system. Stages will be scored as time plus, with hit to move on targets.”

It’s not often you encounter a match that’s unapologetically hard. In this instance, no one gets a participation trophy. On several of its six stages, the initial carbine portion was so tough to complete, competitors didn’t even have time to pull their bolt guns out of the bag before the shot timer beeped, signaling they’d run up against the 4-minute par time. Due to the rules, shooters couldn’t simply engage a difficult target, take the penalty and move on; you had to get your hits. This resulted in lots of magazine changes on stages, which — had they been shot the way everyone hoped — could theoretically have been cleaned in six rounds. 

Carbine targets were small, and placed in such a way that made ranging with an LRF difficult. If you took the number on the display as gospel, there was a fair chance you’d wind up sending rounds either over or under the target, many of which were placed so there was vegetation behind them, making spotting impacts very difficult. 

There were several times, after failing to connect on what I knew was a good shot, I had to employ one of the most effective pieces of shooting advice passed on to me. “If you’re not hitting where your reticle is pointing, aim somewhere else,” were the sage words of one mentor. 

Of course, you have to have confidence in both your equipment and personal skills in order to not just throw rounds wildly in the general direction of the target, but sometimes unforeseen environmental factors will come into play. 

Some of the most challenging targets in the whole match were the movers. 

The carbine target was set at 3 mph, and located in such a way that it was only visible between bushes for about 20 feet. To make things just a bit spicier, there was a berm about 40 yards behind it, which almost everyone wound up ranging, instead of the target itself. If you didn’t take the time to observe your misses and just blindly hammered away using the correction you were sure you needed, you’d wind up with a pile of brass, a few hits bestowed by kindly shooting gods, and a beep that let you know you’d run out of time. 

The bolt gun mover was no less forgiving, set out at around 600 yards and moving at an estimated 5 mph, the shooter had 10 rounds to get as many hits as possible, using whatever time they had on the clock after clearing all their carbine targets.

Everyone who shot the match walked away with smiles on their faces, even if for some the event was a humbling experience. Gear was thoroughly wrung out, dragged through the dust and heat, banged against props and humped around in real-world conditions. We hope the match format continues, as it’s not only a good test of skills and gear, but it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun. And isn’t that what shooting sports are supposed to be?

MATCH EQUIPMENT

Given caliber restrictions imposed by the Match Director, I went with the easy button of a 16-inch-barreled 5.56 carbine and 6.5 Creedmoor bolt action. For someone looking to game the system, it’s conceivable that a 6 ARC gas gun could cover all the bases in one platform, but the shooter would be giving up some long-range ability in exchange for lighter all-up weight. Plus, bolt guns are simply easier to shoot at distance. 

CARBINE

The Ridgeline Defense RD-15 LPR has been racking up wins in gas gun matches since it was quietly launched a couple of years ago. We got one of the first test samples, but lacked a suitable venue to really wring it out. Until now.

We’ve used it occasionally to test ammo and optics, but until you use it in real-world conditions, it’s hard to get a feel for just how well built this little carbine really is. Using input from the Ridgeline instructor cadre who are drawn from the SF community, all the subtle accuracy tweaks to Stoner’s orginal design have been incorporated into an off-the-shelf product. You could slap down a credit card on Friday, throw on your choice of optic and take it racing Saturday. 

DETAILS

The heart of the system is a cut rifled barrel blank from Proof Research, thermally fit to the upper reciever, and secured in place with a 3-inch-long barrel nut. The upper itself is machined from bar stock and reinforced in critical places in order to increase rigidity. In keeping with its role, the barrel has a heavy profile — not a boat anchor by any means, but thankfully free of absurdities like M203 cuts and abrupt changes in diameter. Its gas port diameter is sized for ammo on the hotter end of the spectrum, and to get our sample to consistently lock back the bolt on the last round of our SIG 77-grain OTM ammo, we had to swap out the original robust buffer spring for a weaker one. 

Its intermediate length gas system makes for a smooth recoil impulse, which was further tamed by a three-port brake we found rattling around in the bottom of a parts box. Ridgeline ships the LPR with an A2 flash hider as a placeholder, in the expectation that the user will swap in their preferred muzzle device. The gas block takes cues from KAC, in that it’s keyed into the barrel shoulder and secured in place not by the usual taper pins or set screws, but by a jam nut threaded onto the barrel itself. 

There’s been a lot of chatter recently regarding point of impact shift caused by changing the amount of force exerted on an AR’s rail. All ARs suffer from this phenomenon to one degree or another, as it’s a characteristic of the way the barrel, rail, and receiver come together at the barrel nut, but the amount of deflection varies depending on design, execution and brand. 

Ridgeline mitigates this shift by attaching the rail directly to the upper, rather than barrel nut itself. Generally, you can expect to see 0.1-0.2 MILs of downward shift going from bipod to bag, and the RD-15 was consistent in this. No biggie, and most people can’t shoot well enough to even notice it, let alone let it become a factor in real-world marksmanship.

For our bolt gun, we pulled from the back of the safe one of RECOIL’s past cover guns, the Strasser RS700 from Issue 69. It won us over back in 2023 with it’s bug hole accuracy and blazing fast straight pull action, and we figured it’d be just the ticket on the DPSC’s mover stage. Sure enough, ripping a bolt handle straight to the rear proved to have considerably less movement in the glass than a conventional bolt gun and allowed for a couple more hits on target than would otherwise have been the case. 

Other important equipment included an Eberlestock pack to carry everything, Leupold rangefinding binos, a Kestrel ballistic computer, and Spartan Precision bipods and tripod. 

ROUNDS DOWNRANGE

One of the most noticeable aspects of shooting the RD-15 was its consistency. Every flavor of 69 and 77gr OTM ammo we shot, impacted our target in the same place. Some grouped tighter than others, but nothing shot over 1MOA, or hit outside the center ring. The most accurate factory ammo tested was also the slowest, with SIG’s 77-grain offering struggling to break 2,500 fps at the muzzle, but as it routinely turned in ½-minute groups with single figure SD’s, we had no problem tuning the rifle to it.