CheyTac long range rifle system: a 2,000-yard sniper capability
by John C. Krull
Gun Week Production Manager
There have been many books written and movies produced about snipers and sniping during wartime. The Japanese used it well against the Americans during the fighting for the Pacific Islands. The Russians used it against the Germans and vice versa during World War II. Both sides used snipers during the Vietnam War.
While there has always been a stigma attached to the people who were able to line up their intended victim in their sights, squeeze the trigger and with little or no feeling, shoot and kill their intended target, they have always performed their duty for their country to the best of their ability with the equipment that they had available.
The old bolt-action Springfield 03 sniper rifles were manufacturer by companies like Remington, High Standard and Smith Corona, mounted with Weaver or Unertl scopes. Later the Remington 700s and Winchester Model 70s, along with modified M14s, have been some of the arms used by American soldiers and Marines for sniping. Currently there is talk all across the nation about banning the ownership, by civilians, of the .50 caliber sniper rifles made by companies like Barrett Firearms and other firearms that fire the .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge. The equipment for sniping has come a long way in the last 100 years.
Something relatively new in sniper-grade rifles has come from a little town named Arco, in Idaho. Arco is a nice little town. The population is 1,692, living in 801 housing units. The one side of the town is a small mountain range whose name I have forgotten, something like Lost River. On the side of the rocks the graduating high school classes have for years bravely (or maybe stupidly) climbed the mountain to paint on their piece of rock the year of their graduating class. I was told people come from all over to see the markings the classes have left. You can’t get to Arco from here so you have to fly in elsewhere and get to Arco by way of a four-wheeled vehicle.
In June of last year I was asked to come out to see the place and told I would be familiarized with the CheyTac Long Range Rifle System and the CheyTac Intervention System. CheyTac LLC (PO Box 822, 363 Sunset Dr., Dept. GWK, Arco, ID 83213; phone: 208-527-8614; online: www.cheytac.com) comes from the first letter of the two words: Cheyenne and Tactical. I previously had seen a report on the CheyTac rifle on the TV show “Future Weapons,” so I knew enough about it to instantly be interested.
It seems that CheyTac had experimented with several possibilities before coming up with their final caliber choice of .408 CheyTac. To the best of my knowledge no other guns are made that are chambered for this round. It is a compromise between the .338 Lapua and the .50 BMG.
Each bullet is a nickel/copper alloy that is individually turned on a CNC lathe. Each bullet weighs 419 grains. This makes each bullet as identical as possible. So far, Lost River Ballistic Technologies is the only manufacturer of the ammo. So you pretty much have to purchase what you need through CheyTac. You won’t be able to go to your local Gander Mountain and pick up a box. Each round goes for about $5. While the Lapua round is good out to about 700 yards and the .50 BMG has been guaranteed at .5 to 1 MOA; this is probably guaranteed at 1,000 yards or meters. Besides the .50 BMG was meant for use against material and not personnel. There is a second .408 round available which weighs in at 305 grains and is meant for a high velocity near range application.
Now you know a little about the bullet. How about the rifle that accurately launches this projectile 2,000 yards?
According to Wikipedia—“The CheyTac Intervention is an American-made heavy sniper rifle designed by CheyTac LLC for long range soft target interdiction (i.e. anti-personnel/sniper). The CheyTac Intervention rifle is fed using a detachable single-stack magazine, which can hold either 5 or 7 rounds. It fires .408 CheyTac or .375 CheyTac ammunition.” That says it pretty well. These are bolt-action (turn-bolt) rifles that weigh about 29 pounds with a removable barrel. Actually all maintenance can be performed by the shooter. For military and police there is a choice of either a 26 inch barrel or a 28 inch barrel. There is a single shot version, the M325, that has a 28-inch barrel, but this model also only weighs 16.5 pounds. I believe that they will sell only the 26 inch barreled version to the civilian market.
The rifles we got to shoot wore a Nightforce NXS 5.5-22x variable-magnification scope with a 56mm objective. You often had to zoom out in order to find your target’s location and then zoom back up for shot placement.
My trip to Arco took a total of 4 days. The first and the last were pretty much just travel time and getting to know the others that were along. The group was very diverse. We had businessmen, police officers, police snipers, gun dealers and, of course, there were two gun writers there. Many of the police are instructors for CheyTac. Besides me, Marilyn Stone from UT was the other gun writer invited for those four days. We did get to know each other a little bit during our stay in Arco and hope to get together with both of our spouses in Las Vegas during the SHOT Show in a few weeks. After traveling, the first night was topped off with a BBQ dinner and a bonfire at Dave Durham’s house.
On the morning of the second day, we all met at the motel and car-pooled down to CheyTac offices. There we were familiarized with the caliber, the gun and the computer program, which is the brains of the whole system. With this information under our belts we spent some time sighting in the rifles and getting used to their performance before lunch.
After lunch it was off to the desert for some serious shooting. The CheyTac isn’t a gun that I’d like to carry a very long distance. But its weight does help to reduce recoil. The drive into the hills was something else. You couldn’t do it without a 4-wheel-drive vehicle. In order to be sure of your backstop with a gun like this you have to really go into the back country or shoot straight at a mountain for a backstop. It seemed like we drove through this desolate country forever before we got to the hill we were going to shoot from. The country was beautiful, but empty. Every once in a while you would see a cow but not many. This wasn’t the Idaho that I had pictured with fields of potatoes growing.
Once at the location we were to shoot from, Jason Durham familiarized us once again with the gun and the procedures to follow. He also really got into the computer part of the CheyTac System.
The computer in this case is a Casio IT-70, a small hand-held computer that has programmed into it all the information that is needed for several military calibers from .223 all the way up to the CheyTac .408 and the .50 BMG. You have to enter all the vital information into the computer so that it can tell you how much windage and elevation to use on the gun for a shot at say 800 yards or 1,200 yards or even 2,000 yards. I will include a couple of pictures of the PDA computers that we were using. We also used information from a Kestrel 4000 and a Vector Laser Rangefinder to get some of the needed data.
There is a lot of information that the computer needs to know to compute your shot. Among these variables is windage, not only at the muzzle, but also at the target and also about mid-way to the target. It needs to know the current temperature of the air, and the temperature of the ammo and other information about the ammo including burn rate of the powder. It needs to know your elevation from sea level. You need to input weather conditions and the direction you are shooting from on the earth from true north. Now this isn’t just North or South but the exact direction and also your location on the earth with the latitude and longitude. The computer does a correction to take into consideration the spin of the earth, which is called Coriolis. This was a new word for me. I have never considered that from the time that I shoot to the time that my bullet gets to my target that the earth has moved.
Now this isn’t so important when you are shooting 100 yards or so, but when you are shooting out to 2,000 yards it becomes an important piece of data. Also, the direction you are shooting will increase or decrease the distance that the target will have traveled on the moving earth before the bullet gets there. If you are at the equator and shooting directly East or West, the effect is going to be far less than if you are shooting directly North or South. Boy, I sure was learning a lot!
Data can also be entered to take into consideration if your target is moving or not. I hope I have given you all the information that the computer wants you to give it. The data needs to be as accurate as possible for a good hit.
Once Jason has gotten us all up to speed on the Casios, we started shooting. As I remember, we started at some relatively close targets at 800 yards. Jason acted as spotted most of the time and gave us windage corrections or told us when the wind was right to shoot. It was amazing what we were hitting at 800 yards.
We than switched to some targets that were out there a little bit farther—1,200 yards. All the targets were steel plates that aren’t any bigger than a man’s chest that we were firing on. Once again with the correction given to us by the computer we set the scope and started shooting. Something that I have never been able to do before, because of recoil, is see my bullet hit a target. But in this case you do have the time to get back on the scope and back on the target after the shot to see your shot hit the target. At 1,200 yards we could still hear the impact.
Next we did some real shooting at about 1,900 yards. After the scope changes were entered, the gun was hitting the target almost every time. And when there was a miss it wasn’t by more than a few feet and was attributed to either wind or shooter disruption. I just couldn’t believe it. I was hitting targets at distances like this. I hadn’t shot any thing close to 1,000 yards since I was on the Marine Corps rifle team and had never even considered 1,900 yards.
The temperature was quite hot all day up in the high desert but we all drank lots of fluids to keep hydrated, but I’ll tell you between the shooting and the weather I was beat. That night for dinner I was starved. And it felt so good to climb into bed that night.
The second day of shooting was done in a different location than the day before. Any one who saw the CheyTac version of “Future Weapons” might remember them shooting from one hill to another 2,000 yards and more away. This is where we did our shooting the second day. I’m not so sure that I would have wanted to be one of the drivers on the roads that we took into the mountains that day. At times you couldn’t see the road because we seemed to be going almost straight up. The ride by itself was something, but we also got to shoot guns. What a day!
The country we were in on the second day, while being very barren, also had a beauty about it.
We did most of the shooting with a suppressor on the CheyTac rifle. The big question asked by many of us was, “How long was that silencer good for shooting this caliber.” We had all been under the impression that silencers don’t hold up too well even for small calibers and didn’t expect much longevity from this one. I think it was Jason who said that they had already shot thousands of rounds through this one and it was still holding up well.
The CheyTac system is being used already by several countries, including the US Marine Corps. From what I have seen it definitely fits into the future weapons category and I expect that we will be seeing more and more of our armed forces and those of many other countries replacing their present gear with the CheyTac system. I’m not as convinced that it will become a standard part of every big city’s police departments arsenal because I’m not sure how often police SWAT teams really need to reach out and touch someone that far away.
If you want to see the CheyTac in action, then you should rent the movie “Shooter” from your local video store. It is based on a book by Stephen Hunter about Bob Lee Swagger, who is played by Mark Wahlberg. It is a good movie and you’ll enjoy it and also get to see the CheyTac in action.
The complete CheyTac system with the computer sells for close to $14, 000 the last I heard, so not all of us are going to go running out to get one right away. But it you get a change to shoot one, don’t pass it up. You will love it.
CheyTac has also talked about producing chips or memory cards for PDAs that would give you the capability of entering the data needed for your caliber and gun and the computer would come up with a solution to your shooting exercises. So that is something to look forward to in the future.
For those going to the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas Feb. 2-5, you should be able to get a look at the CheyTac System at booth #322.
Remember when contacting any of the companies mentioned in the article to tell them that John at Gun Week sent you.
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