Most shooters meet their first federation target by accident. You visit a German club and the 100m lane has a card you have never seen. A French range hands you a C50 and calls the event TAR 830. Your kid joins an American junior BB gun program and comes home with an AR-4 card covered in ten bullseyes. All of them look like ISSF paper at a glance, and none of them score quite like it.
This guide compares FFTIR vs ISSF targets, the BDS ring system, and the NRA's AR-4 so you know exactly what changes when you step outside ISSF rules. We have covered the individual cards before: the BDS 100m Ringziel dimensions, the FFTIR TAR 830 and TAR 832 stages, and the full ISSF target dimensions reference. Here is the head-to-head.
How do FFTIR targets differ from ISSF targets?
FFTIR, the French shooting federation, mostly does not design its own cards. It borrows genuine ISSF targets and wraps French courses of fire around them, so the difference lives in the match format rather than the paper. TAR 830 precision shooting uses the C50, the same 50cm card ISSF 25m sport pistol shooters know, scored in integer rings from 1 to 100. TAR 831, the vitesse event, is shot on the ISSF rapid-fire target but with a French program of four five-shot series, two in 20 seconds and two in 10 seconds.
That borrowing has a practical consequence: your ISSF-trained eye and zero carry over directly. A shooter who has spent a season on 25m sport pistol walks onto a TAR 830 line already knowing the C50's black, its ring depth and how a gauge sits on a close nine. What changes is rhythm. Seven minutes for ten one-handed shots on a service pistol with a 1.36 kg minimum trigger is a different skill from ISSF timing, even though every ring on the card is familiar.
The gong stages have no ISSF equivalent at all. Twenty centimetre steel squares falling under a clock, worth five points each, are pure FFTIR. So when you compare FFTIR vs ISSF targets honestly, the answer is: the targets overlap heavily, the matches barely.
How BDS targets differ: Germany's own ring geometry
The BDS (Bund der Sportschützen) goes the opposite way. Its targets are BDS designs described in the federation's Sporthandbuch, not ISSF stock, and the numbers prove it. The 100m Ringziel, sheet Z 1, puts a 34mm ten ring on a 395mm square sheet with 17mm ring bands out to ring 1. A 17mm Innenzehn, the inner ten, sits inside the ten ring for tiebreaking, and the black Spiegel aiming mark covers rings 5 through 10 at 204mm across.
Compare that with ISSF geometry. On the 10m air rifle card the ten ring is 0.5mm wide, each ring adds 5mm, and the black disc is 30.5mm. The proportions, how much of the sheet the black eats, how fast ring values fall away from centre, all differ from anything ISSF prints. A 34mm ten ring sounds enormous until you remember it sits at 100m, where it subtends a smaller angle than that 0.5mm ring does at 10m.
Ring scoring itself works the same way you already know: shots are gauged from the edge, higher ring wins, inner tens break ties the way ISSF countback and inner tens do. If you can score ISSF paper, you can score BDS paper after five minutes with the spec sheet. What you cannot do is assume a class uses the Ringziel; some BDS 100m classes shoot the separate ISSF 100m target instead, so the rulebook decides before the paper does.
The NRA AR-4: the card American juniors learn on
The NRA's BB gun program runs at 5m on the AR-4 family: AR-4/1 with a single bullseye, AR-4/5 with five, AR-4/10 with ten. Per the NRA BB gun rulebook, the ten ring is 0.125 inches across and each ring adds 0.300 inches out to the 1 ring at 2.825 inches. Rings 8, 9 and 10 are black, a smaller black than most ISSF cards carry.
Scoring has a quirk ISSF shooters will not expect. Two gauges are used on the same card: an outward AR-4 gauge for rings 10 through 3, and a standard 4.5mm air gun inward gauge for rings 2 and 1. Mixed gauge rules like this exist in smallbore and highpower too, but if your whole background is 10m air rifle, the AR-4 is likely your first encounter with them.
For a parent coaching a junior, the design logic is the point. The AR-4 is scaled so a wobbly eight-year-old on a Daisy still hits scoring rings, gets feedback and wants to come back. It is a training instrument first and a competition card second, which is also why the bullseye count varies by version.
Federation targets vs ISSF: the side-by-side
| Target | Federation | Distance | Ten ring | Ring step | Black covers | Scoring circles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10m air rifle | ISSF | 10m | 0.5 mm | 5 mm | 30.5 mm | 45.5 mm, one |
| 10m air pistol | ISSF | 10m | 11.5 mm | 16 mm | 59.5 mm (7 to 10) | 155.5 mm, one |
| C50 | ISSF card, FFTIR use | 25m | 50 mm | 50 mm | 200 mm (7 to 10) | 500 mm, one |
| 100m Ringziel | BDS | 100m | 34 mm | 17 mm | 204 mm (5 to 10) | 340 mm, one |
| AR-4 | NRA | 5m | 0.125 in | 0.300 in | rings 8 to 10 | 2.825 in, 1/5/10 bulls |
Read the table as three philosophies. ISSF compresses scoring into tiny central zones to separate elite shooters. BDS keeps integer rings but rescales everything for 100m shooting with club-legal rifles. The NRA scales a full ring system down into something a first-time junior can score on.
Why the differences matter for your training log
Scores are only comparable within a target system. A 92 on the BDS Ringziel tells you nothing about how you would fare on ISSF 50m paper, and a TAR 830 total mixes C50 precision with gong speed in a way no ISSF event does. If you shoot across systems, log them as separate disciplines rather than one downward-trending average, or the numbers will gaslight you.
That is also where photo scoring earns its keep, because the app does the arithmetic per target system instead of you doing ring math in your head. Scoring your cards with TargetLog keeps FFTIR, BDS and club ISSF events in one place, each scored against its own rings, so cross-federation progress is visible without ever pretending the targets are equivalent.
faq
Can one target ever be legal in two federations? Yes, and the C50 is the best example: it is ISSF stock paper that FFTIR precision events use unchanged. Legality follows the rulebook of the match, so when the card is shared, only the course of fire and tiebreak rules tell you whose rules you are under.
Are federation ring sizes metric or imperial? BDS and FFTIR use metric, inheriting the European convention. NRA targets are specified in inches, including the AR-4's 0.125 inch ten ring, so expect conversions whenever you cross the Atlantic in either direction.
Do inner tens exist outside ISSF? On BDS paper, yes: the 17mm Innenzehn functions exactly like the ISSF inner ten for tiebreaking. FFTIR precision events resolve ties on the C50 with inner tens and countback as well. The AR-4 has no inner ten.
