Originally Posted by
hossdaniels
25-30 yards max. A rifled barrel and some practice should get you out to 125-150 yds with slugs. Smooth bore slugs, I dont know, maybe 50 yds? Depends on how far away you can put ALL your shots in a 5" circle. Thankfully they still let us use our rifles in NC. Lots of the boys in shotgun only states have switched to smokeless muzzleloaders like the savage. They can shoot up to 300 yds with practice, 200 yds out of the box, just point and shoot.
This is not true. Shooting the recommended max load of AA-5744 and a 300 grain Barnes Expander MZ I'm getting roughly 2200 fps (which is roughly the same performance possible from 3 pellet T7 loads). I have my Savage zeroed at 175 yards for a MPBR of 200. By 200 yards it's dropping so fast that I'd never even consider a 300 yard shot. I've seen sabot slug loads that exceed the performance I'm getting from my Savage, but the Savage does have the advantage in the accuracy department. My last time out I put 4 shots into a 3" circle at 175 in a 20mph gusty wind with a target that I could hardly see the bullseye on (just a 1/2" orange diamond, which is hard to aim at with a 9x scope at 175 yards).
Regarding the OP's questions. You sound like you're new to deer hunting, and if so, welcome to the sport! It's good to have new hunters keeping the great American hunting tradition alive.
I wouldn't use buckshot unless the law said I had to. You'll get better range and killing power from a slug any day. You will, however, need to practice to ensure you can at least hit an 8" paper plate every time from whatever range shooting from field positions. The bench is a place to sight in and fine tune loads, not a place to see if you are a proficient marksman. Once you reach a distance where you can't hit that paper plate every time, then you've found your max hunting range. Everybody's different. My dad was an instinctive shooter with slugs, and was able to hit running deer at 100 yards with 20 gauge rifled slugs with just a bead, and standing deer he could hit out to 125 no problem. I would never even attempt such a shot, but he made it look easy. That said, if I had a shot at a standing, calm deer at 200 yards with my ML on a calm day with a rest for my gun, I'd take the shot. It's all about the link between you, the marksman, and the gun. Know the gun, and know your limits and you'll do fine.
As for how close can you get from a deer. I've shot deer at 30 yards sitting on the ground with a ML. I shot two dear the one year I bowhunted, one at 12 yards, and the other at 15. I've been within 10 yards of wild deer on half a dozen occasions (some hunting, some not), and I once had a deer wake me up from a nap by stepping on a twig less than 10 feet from where I was sitting (one of the downsides to hunting early ML season when it gets warm by 10am!
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As for the whole 50% thing... it really doesn't break down like that. Rest assured, if you are close enough to put a slug through a deer's ribcage, it will die. The slug's not going to bounce off because it's going too slow. The issue is that as the velocity drops off, the trajectory gets steeper and the bullet falls farther related to the horizontal distance it travels. In other words, range estimation becomes critical as a slug past 100 yards can fall several inches in just 25 yards, enough to make you either miss or have a very marginal hit out of the kill zone. So it's not that the slug won't kill, it that is becomes very hard to hit the deer in the vitals. This is why practice and knowing your gun and load are so important.
Mike