Picture two shooters on the same course of fire. One ran it clean, every hit in the centre, but took his time. The other flew through it twice as fast, only half his holes landed out near the edges. Which of them shot better? You cannot tell by eye: one bought accuracy with time, the other bought time with accuracy. Practical shooting needed a way to judge them honestly, by a single common measure. That measure is the hit factor.
What is hit factor
The hit factor is worked out about as simply as it gets: take all the points you scored on a stage and divide them by the time it took you to shoot it.
Hit factor = points / time (sec)What you get is "points per second" - the rate at which you produce a result. A shooter who scores 100 points in 20 seconds produces 5 points a second, and his result is 5.0. The same shooter in 25 seconds produces 4.0. Same points, lower figure, because they cost more time.
The whole trick is that two things which usually pull in opposite directions meet in one number: how well you hit and how fast. Neither one on its own is what it shows - it shows the blend of the two. And that is exactly why it lets you compare shooters who work in completely different ways.
Why neither the most accurate nor the fastest shooter wins
A beginner is usually sure that practical shooting is about speed. Hence the classic mistake: open the throttle at any cost, just go faster. Hit factor kills that bet. The moment speed turns into spread, the points drop faster than the pace climbs, and the number falls.
Leaning the other way is no better. You can place every hole dead centre, but if you freeze over each one admiring your sights, the time grows and the same figure slides down. Slow clean shooting and fast dirty shooting meet at one point - the same number. The shooter who fires slowly and never misses and the shooter who sprays fast and misses end up close together.
This is where the whole essence of the sport hides. The winner is not the most accurate and not the fastest, but the one who found his own point of balance - the top pace at which accuracy still holds. It shows that point without mercy: any step toward an extreme, whether speed or caution, drops the number.
Where the points come from
For the number to be fair, hits have to be worth different amounts. The practical target is split into zones: the central Alpha is worth 5 points, the Charlie around it 4 or 3, the outer Delta 2 or 1. That spread in the Charlie and Delta figures depends on how powerful your ammunition is (in the sport this is Major and Minor), but at home, dry, you do not need to think about it: there are no rounds, aim for the Alpha, it is worth 5 either way. The full breakdown of zones and poppers is in the separate guide on IPSC targets.
Now for the thing that turns this plain division into an honest judge - the penalties. A miss does not merely fail to score. It takes points away: minus 10. The same comes off for hitting a white no-shoot target, the "hostage" you are not allowed to shoot. These minuses come off your total before the sum is divided by time.
Take in the scale. One Alpha is plus 5, one miss is minus 10. So a single miss cancels two perfect hits at once and drags you into the red. That is why the number punishes the shooter who rushes and misses far harder than the one who merely dawdles. The slow shooter loses fractions of a figure. A miss loses it in chunks.
How hit factor splits the points between shooters
So far we have worked the number out for one person. But its real job begins when there are many shooters - that is how it decides who won.
Here is how it works. Every stage has a weight of its own - the most points it can hand out. That whole maximum goes to whoever posted the highest hit factor: he is the stage winner, his result is a hundred percent. Everyone else is paid not by the points they scored, but by their share of the leader: your number is divided by the winner's number, and that is the percentage of the stage points you take.
Let's put figures on it. Say the stage is worth 100 points. The winner's hit factor is 6.0 - he takes all 100. Yours is 4.5. Divide 4.5 by 6.0, you get 0.75 - and you carry 75 points off the stage. Fall a quarter behind and you come up a quarter of the points short.
Hence the conclusion that trips up beginners. The absolute value on its own tells you almost nothing. Is a five good or bad? Depends on the stage and depends on the fives around you. On close, large targets even an 8.0 can be a weak result, while on distant small ones a 3.0 can be a winning one. It is always read in comparison, and growing it is worth doing not up to a pretty figure, but faster than the rest grow theirs.
Let's do the math
Take a simple task: six shots on one target, each shooter with his own style.
The perfectionist puts all six in the Alpha - that is 30 points - but spends 5 seconds on it. His hit factor: 30 divided by 5 is 6.0. Clean, but unhurried.
The middle shooter is calm too, only a touch looser: four Alphas and two Charlies, that is 20 plus 8, 28 points in all, in 4 seconds. His figure: 28 over 4 is 7.0. He shot better than the perfectionist, even though he hit slightly worse - he won a second and did no damage.
Now the one who decided it is all about speed. Five Alphas and one miss, but only 3 seconds. Count it: 25 points minus 10 penalty is 15, divide by 3, you get 5.0. The fastest of the three came last. One miss threw him below the plodding perfectionist, because it stripped not one Alpha off him but two.
There is the whole lesson, squeezed into three numbers. Speed lifts the figure, but only until it starts costing hits. The moment it does, the figure caves in, and caves the harder the cruder the mistake. In this arithmetic a miss is the most expensive thing that can happen to you.
How to measure your hit factor at home
This number lives off two halves, and both are taken at home. Time comes from the timer: the split between clicks, the full run time, the cut-off on the par timer's signal - all of it the part you see clearly and honestly in dry fire. Accuracy comes from a marked target: if you train with an airsoft replica, the BB actually lands in a zone, and if you dry fire a real or air pistol, you look at where the front sight sat at the click - in the Alpha, or already slipped into the Charlie.
Bringing the two halves into one number is what the app's built-in hit factor calculator is for. It runs on exactly the formula we went through: you punch in how many hits landed in the Alpha, how many in the Charlie, how many in the Delta, set the run time in seconds, flip Major or Minor - and out comes the number. No mental arithmetic: the calculator hands out the points by zone and divides by time itself.
This is what turns an evening of "clicking away before bed" into measurable training. Until it is worked out, you can only guess at your progress from feel, and feel lies. Once worked out, it becomes one figure you cannot fool: it is either higher than last week or it is not. Measuring progress by a number, not by a mood - that is what it is for at home.
What you build at home, and what you build at the range
Honestly about the line. At home you truly build only one of its halves - speed: the draw, the transition, the trigger work, the run time. And you train yourself in the main thing - to look at your shooting as a number, not as the pleasant feeling of "that seemed to work".
The second half, live holes in the target, lives at the range. There it is not an eyeballed guess that counts but real holes in the cardboard, and the full hit factor with real hits comes together only on the line, under an instructor's eye. Work at home does not replace the range and does not argue with it. It does something else: it brings you to the session already fast and already in the habit of measuring yourself by an honest figure, so the expensive time on the range goes on shooting rather than on learning the pace.