TrackingPoint Shows Off the “Mile Maker,” a Rifle With 1,800-yard Range
11th January 2015
In what’s becoming a yearly tradition for Ars, we met up with Austin-based TrackingPoint at CES to see what was new in the world of “Precision Guided Firearms”—the term the company uses to refer to its Linux-powered rifles. Last year, TrackingPoint had just taken the wraps off of its AR-15 PGF (which we got to shoot a few months later), and this year we got to take a peek at a new prototype weapon that can accurately put rounds on targets up to a mile away—targets that can be moving up to 30 miles per hour.
Dubbed the “Mile Maker,” the prototype was described by TrackingPoint representative Anson Gordon as “mostly” representative of the final product. The weapon at least for now is built around an enormous, enormously heavy, custom-milled steel barrel, which fires what TrackingPoint is calling “338TP”—a round somewhat similar to .338 Lapua Magnum but with some customized attributes. The company decided to continue on with their own cartridges for the longer-range rifle instead of moving up to a bigger round (like .50 BMG) because of the superior ballistics of the .338 bullet over the bigger .50 round.