Building a Rifle to Reach 7,744 Yards: The System Behind the 4.4-Mile Hit
When we set out to surpass the four-mile mark, the honest starting point was this: you cannot buy a 4.4-mile rifle. No factory makes one, no shelf holds one, and no single component decides the outcome. What put a 422-grain bullet onto a steel plate at 7,744 yards on September 13, 2022 was a system — a rifle, an optic stack, a cartridge, and a platform, each chosen to do one narrow job and to work with everything around it. Scott Austin made the system-level decisions, and this is an account of how the pieces came together and why.
Start with the problem, not the parts
At 4.4 miles the bullet spends more than 24 seconds in the air, arches over 2,500 feet above the line of sight, and arrives descending at roughly 48 degrees. Two hard constraints fall out of that immediately. First, you need an enormous amount of elevation — far more than any scope provides on its own. Second, the projectile has to stay stable long after it goes subsonic, which it does around 3,500 yards into flight, less than halfway to the target.
Everything in the build traces back to solving those two problems without introducing new ones.
Getting to the elevation
A conventional scope, even a top-tier one, tops out well short of what this shot demanded. Scott’s solution was to stack elevation from three sources rather than ask any one part to do the impossible.
The rifle itself carried about 40 MOA of built-in cant. On top of that, S&S Sporting in Driggs, Idaho — Scott Null and his sons Meshac and Nehemia — built a custom 350 MOA scope rail, machined to a standard where a ten-thousandth of an inch is not good enough. That combination gets you most of the way, but not all of it. The remaining elevation came from a Charlie TARAC from tacomHQ, an optical prism that reflects the incoming image and, in effect, convinces the scope it has hundreds more minutes of angle than it physically has. It adds roughly 850 to 900 MOA of usable elevation without the scope ever leaving its mechanical range.
That solved problem one and created a new one. With that much angle dialed in, the scope is essentially staring into the barrel. You cannot look through steel. So the system also carried a Delta Direct from tacomHQ — a periscope that offsets the sight picture about 2.1 inches to see cleanly around the bore. tacomHQ, through John Baker, also “structured” the 40-inch LRI barrel, a treatment that kept it running cool enough that heat-induced wander never became the variable it easily could have been.
The optic and the decision behind it
The glass was a Vortex Razor 6-36×56 Gen III with an EBR-7D MOA reticle, held in a double set of Leupold Mark IV rings. Worth being precise about how that choice got made, because it says something about the whole project: when Scott settled on the Razor, the question was never which scope offered the best deal. It was which scope we would trust for a shot we might only get one clean morning to attempt. After testing other top-tier options, the newest Razor was the answer. On a build like this, the cost of the wrong optic isn’t money — it’s the whole attempt.
The cartridge and the bullet
The rifle is chambered in .416 Barrett, built on a McMillan TAC-50 action in a Cadex Dual Strike chassis, with a Timney trigger and a Terminator T6 muzzle brake out of New Zealand. For all its size — the rig weighs close to 40 pounds — the structured barrel and brake tame the recoil to less than a .243, which matters more than it sounds: a comfortable gun is a consistent gun over a 69-shot morning.
The load was built by Unknown Munitions of Post Falls, Idaho — Jacob and Jessica Mushaney — using Barrett brass, H50BMG propellant, and CCI 135 primers, driving a machine-lathed 422-grain Cutting Edge MTAC monolithic copper bullet. That bullet weight was not a guess. Our gunsmith had done extensive testing past 3,500 yards and understood what it takes to keep a projectile stable after it drops through the transonic zone; his son ran the numbers and pointed us to roughly 420 grains. We took the advice of people who had already been there rather than reinvent it.
We also owe a specific, bounded thank-you to Frank Green of Bartlein Barrels. Bartlein could not build our barrel inside our timeline — there were customers ahead of us, and they honored that line — but Frank still sent Scott a detailed email of recommendations on cartridge, bullet design, and twist rate. He did not make our barrel; he gave us guidance that shaped the build. That distinction matters, and we keep it straight.
The velocities tell the rest: 3,300 fps at the muzzle, decaying to 689 fps at the target more than 24.5 seconds later — terminal energy in the neighborhood of a 9mm at the muzzle.
The platform
One overlooked piece: none of this works if the shooter can’t get behind it. With that much elevation dialed and the TARAC in the picture, lying prone on flat ground puts the near terrain in the way of the sight line. Scott designed and built the shooting platform to solve that — canted so the front sits higher than the back, which also spares the shooter the neck strain of holding a position through a long morning of shots.
What the build proves
We publish the full parts list deliberately, because the point was never a proprietary secret. The lesson worth taking from it is architectural, not brand-specific: at extended distance, elevation is assembled from several sources, stability is designed in at the bullet before the trigger is ever touched, and the smartest move is to source each decision to the person who has genuinely solved that problem before. The rifle didn’t make the shot by itself. But without Scott building the world record rifle a system this deliberately, there would have been nothing to walk onto the target. More articles by Shepard and Scott about their Extreme Long Range Shooting research can be found at ShootingExperience.com. Their first book can be purchased on Amazon through our affiliate link.
