Foot pounds needed for rams

[BryanBaxter]

I am moving to airguns from a I want to shoot more standpoint. I have room to be able to eventually hold matches indoors. Warehouse space available to me. So I need to buy a gun. I want to know what kind of energy is needed to take down rams.
The rifle I am considering is a RWS 54 Air King in .177. I have not seen much talk about them. I am leaning that way because it is recoilless and can be shot with a firm hold. They are self contained and if articles are to be believed they are capable of 5 shot 50 yard groups of .95 ctc in .177. Is it a totally inappropriate gun and if so what would be the alternative? I do not want the cost of PCP or the temperature variance of co2. The recoilless nature of the 54 really appeals to me. I know there is the FWB 300s. It is considerably less powerful.
I am in Woodstock Georgia and anyone interested in is welcome to contact me.

Bryan

[shakes]

hello Bryan. that RWS would be fine at taking down the rams, it definatly has enough power. If your not familiar with Stright Shooters air gun forum you might want to check it out. Unfortunatly someone hacked into there system and its down at the moment but an excellent forum just for airguns and alot of the guys on there prefer springers as to pcp. Go to straightshooters.com and click on the chat room. Hope this info helps.

[BryanBaxter]

Thanks, I have been on their forum but was glad to find Steelchickens. I have found a 54 and am going to go ahead and spend my refund on it. Just doing my part to stimulate the economy.

[shakes]

Cool. I just purchased a AirArms EV2 and cant wait for the field target season to start. I guess we both did our part eh?

[frog5215]

I must respectfully disagree.

While the RWS 54 (and 48/52) can be used for silhouette, they're not really very good tools for the task.
A 7.5 joule target gun (what? about 6 ft/lb?-550-600fps) has plenty of power to take down rams@ 45yd, even with an 8gr pellet.

For Sporter class, the popular AA TX200, ProSport, and such HW/Beeman models as the 97 and venerable 77 are among the most suitable
Strikes against the supermagnums include being hard to cock. Including sighters, 50-80 shots in an afternoon constitute a significant workout just cocking the gun.

Relatively bad triggers are the norm on RWS springers, as compared to HW and AA products.

The one RWS rifle I find really well suited to silhouette in the out of production model 46, which holds well and has fairly smooth firing behavior. The old model 45 seemed to work pretty well, too.

Additional power over a certain level has little benefit in air rifle, and the downside of harsher firing behavior, hard cocking, target damage, difficulty keeping a scope locked down. I put that power level around 800 fps with a 10gr .177 pellet.

The benefit of the self contained gun is significant: no tank to haul, no air to run out of.

The disadvantage of target power guns is that you really can't use a pellet over 8gr, and that light pellet @ 600fps is pretty wind sensitive, but if you can put the pellet on the target, it will go down unless it's a really marginal edgie. With our resettable targets, I sort of miss the turkeys turned 180 degrees.

For several years in the early '80s, I shot an HW55 and an RWS 75. They shot the same pellets with the same velocity, about 580 fps; each worked as practice for the other.

I think the national records (3 man team) shot with the HW 55 may still stand. We all three shot the same gun.

I did try a TX200 (10gr @825fps) and made Master about 3 years later ( no master scores since, though. It's been a hard decade).

My point is, in part, that a match is enough work without the handicap of a weight training session during the match, combined with a second class trigger.