What you really need to know about mils is this: when looking through your scope, you'll see your crosshairs, as well as those dots or hash marks. At 100 yards, which is a common distance that is used for sighting in a hunting rifle, the distance between these dots represents a height of 3.6 inches on your target. As the distance to your target increases or decreases, so does the representative distance between your mil-dots or hash marks. Despite this, MIL is capable of slightly more acute adjustments tha MOA.

When looking through your MOA scope, you'll typically see your crosshairs, along with lines or dashes on both the vertical and horizontal axis. Using the previous example of 100 yards, the distance between these dashes represents a height of 1.047 inches on your target. While there is a standard known as Shooter’s Minute of Angle (SMOA) where that value is a true 1 inch between dashes, 1.047 inches is so close to 1 inch that it can just be rounded down.

What you really need to know about mils is this: when looking through your scope, you'll see your crosshairs, as well as those dots or hash marks. At 100 yards, which is a common distance that is used for sighting in a hunting rifle, the distance between these dots represents a height of 3.6 inches on your target. As the distance to your target increases or decreases, so does the representative distance between your mil-dots or hash marks. Despite this, MIL is capable of slightly more acute adjustments tha MOA.

When looking through your MOA scope, you'll typically see your crosshairs, along with lines or dashes on both the vertical and horizontal axis. Using the previous example of 100 yards, the distance between these dashes represents a height of 1.047 inches on your target. While there is a standard known as Shooter’s Minute of Angle (SMOA) where that value is a true 1 inch between dashes, 1.047 inches is so close to 1 inch that it can just be rounded down.