Unfortunately this will not be as an elaborate post as i would have liked to have done. Late start and early quit time would be the culprits which i will explain down further below.
My buddy organized this airgun shoot and i asked if i could bring a NEWBIE along who was very interested in PCP's and that he owned a Gamo but wanted an upgrade after shooting all my pcps. I love it when that happens..lol. My buddy said "OF COURSE" and that he would bring his Lonestar 25 and BSA Scorpion 22 and 2 of his Marauder 25's. I brought out my Jack Haley 457, Corsair 308, Rapid 25, Logun Solo 20, Crosmods Disco 22 and a couple of rim fires for later. After arriving at the gentle mans house that owns the Rogue, he greeted us in the driveway and after a bit of chat were we stood, he asked if we were ready to shoot. We eagerly said "YES" and he escorted us to his back yard. Or shall i say RANGE. This guys back yard is HUGE. So huge, its 150 yards DEEP by about 60 yards wide.
So now, he escorts us over to a table that had about 2 airguns on it and one of them was the Rogue. He asked if i wanted to start with that gun and course the answer was yes. I went up to it and the first thing i had to do was to pick it up and man, it's seriously heavy. Without a scale i can't be 100% on point but, that gun had to weigh about 12 lbs. Pyramid Air and Crosmans website sais it weighs 9.5 lbs but, i might just argue with them on that one. My Rapid and JH457 are 10lb guns and the ROGUE is heavier by a good bit. Anyways, we set it up at a table that faced the 100 yard targets and he told me the gun was last sighted in at 100 yards by him so of course i said, hey, that's good enough for me. Of course, i wanted to simply see what she could do at 50 yards but, it wasn't my gun..lol
So now after setting the gun on a tethered setup, i asked him if he shoots it without a tether and if so, does the accuracy differ? He replied that on medium he will shoot about 3 shots then refill but that was a pain and accuracy is the same as tethered so why not keep it tethered. I said, "OK, that makes sense". After getting some brief instructions on cocking the gun to make it HOT or READY and the electronic controls, my first impression was that it's confusing. In actuality it's pretty simple but, it does take some time for you to get used to having a lot of options when all you've ever had was a big bore that was always set on MAX power with any bullet you put in it. Same for most small bores too. With the cocking, you do have to cock the gun like any other bolt action except when you pull the bolt down, you then have to pull it back to make the gun "READY". After this, the display will then shut off and hold the current power setting. The display does not light again until you press a button to change the setting. The display is preprogrammed for LOW-MED-HIGH power with like 4 different bullet weights by NOSLER such as the 145 gr Poly Tip and the 127 gr FN.
So now, we start off on shooting on HIGH power using the 127 gr bullet setting and we were shooting 122 gr bullets...IIRC. Way too much to think about....lol. Anyways, i aim dead center of the bullseye and sent the first bullet down range. I was trying to gather all my initial thoughts as i had to remember how the trigger felt and how loud the shrouded gun was and were the bullet landed. But back to the target, the first bullet landed to the far left of the bullseye on the outer target ring. Cool i said, the first bullet is on paper and that's a start. I then cock the gun to load the second bullet and i noticed how smooth the magazine fed and how nice the gun is too cock. Its was nice. So then i take my second shot and the bullet lands HIGH right at the very top corner of the paper! At this point, i put my head down and said, so this is what they are talking about when the say the accuracy is not good. I then take the 3rd shot and i could not find it on paper. Shot 4 was 3" low of the bullseye and left of it. The 5th and final shot was .5" above the bullseye dead center. So i stop shooting a minute to try to assess what just happened. I then walk down range to put up more targets but not before looking at the ones we just shot. Between the 2 targets shot by 2 different shooter (me being the new guy) they were the same group wise but different POI. Which is expected. These targets were just chalked up by me as fluke and i would retry it at another setting. So now i walk back and we changed the guns setting to MED as i seem to remember others having some decent luck with Med power and we switch the bullets to Noslers 127 gr FP which i had to single load. The FP's did not and DO NOT cycle in the magazine. So again, i take 5 shots with not very much success again. At this point, the other guys there decide since me and Kitto were talking about the accuracy and bullets, they would walk down range and set up more paper targets including the one i just shot. Kitto and i decide to unscrew the shroud which removes exactly like the Marauder shroud..you just unscrew it from the receiver.
After looking at the shrouds internals, we came to the conclusion that the bullets were not clipping his shroud. I then took a picture of the muzzle crown which looked pretty good if i say so myself. So no bad crown job being the culprit either. We then sit back down to continue shooting but without the shroud. I tell Kitto that i wanna shoot the same power level and bullets as the last shots. I then fire 3 FP's and they each landed low and left of bullseye in about a 2.5-3" group and we got excited (LOL) as this was the best and most consistent so far. Oh and yeah, as expected, the muzzle blast UNCORKED is LOUD. Kitto then said, well, put 2 more downrange to make it a 5 shot group and i say, "OHHHH NO, THAT'S THE WORST THING TO DO" and we both laughed cause we knew that adding to more shots to the best groups of the day would mess it up. 2 more shots and VOILA, the group was ruined...lol but, all 5 shots were in the same area. We then continue by shooting more shots with the gun unshrouded but, we were soon interrupted by his nice neighbor. The neighbor thought we were shooting PB's and we just laughed and told him that it was definitely and airgun. So we put up the Rogue.........ARGGGGGHHHHHHH! We were getting somewhere with this thing. And yes, his neighbors are AIRGUN friendly are a great distance aways as all their land plots are about 2-3 times bigger than a normal house property and none of them back up to his property. They are either left or right of him. NICE! The ROGUE is just that loud uncorked. Shooting the gun unshrouded DID make a difference in accuracy and impact but the accuracy is still not up to par. But of course though, we still have more testing to do like shooting 358 bullets with the gun corked and uncorked.
So now Kitto and i talk about bullets and bore size and trying various bullets and gun settings. We also agreed that he should buy some 358 bullets to try. I picked up a few bullets downrange and the engraved rifling marks on them looked LIGHT to me. He thought so too. So there will be more to this story at a later date. We already made plans to go to a real gun range were we would not be bothered or even have to worry about the muzzle report or neighbors.
Here is Kittos .357 Rogue:
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Here is a picture of 3 of the bullets we shot. Kitto definitely said the NOSLERS were no good at all. He did not have any for me to shoot and said he would not buy them ever again:
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Here is a picture of the end piece that keeps the shroud centered over the end of the barrel. Its filled with gunk:
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Here is the muzzle crown of the Rogue barrel. Not the best pic i've ever taken:
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Here are the threads that the shrouds screws onto. Also some set screws that keep the barrel from coming loose:
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Here is a pic of 4 bullets i recovered downrange:
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Here is a short video of the Rogue in action. It's just me shooting it but if you listen to some of the comments by me and Kitto, you get an idea of the Rogues performance. She is very loud even with the shroud so turn your speakers UP!:
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1st impression and over view of the Rogue:
-Seriously HEAVY and not a good field gun. She is a bench gun.
-Long but not longer than my Rapid 25
-Very nice trigger
-Very little recoil cause of weight
-Adjustable butt stock is a big plus. Adjust just like a AR-15 stock.
-Magazine worked with round nose bullets but not flat nose bullets. Kitto's magazine was better than the one Mr Santiago posted but, his would still hang up on certain ammo. Its simply and indexing thing with the magazine. Crosman just need to REALIGN certain spots on the mag and it would more than likely feed anything.
-Bolt handle cocking was pretty decent. No rough feeling at all but not as butter smooth as some small bores i have. But that's OK.
-The shroud cuts down on the bark a little but, even with the shroud on she is LOUD. Too be honest, Crosman could have left the shroud off the gun entirely. To me a shroud is supposed to make the gun quiet but this one is NOT.
-I think the baffles in the shroud are MICKEY MOUSE and the shroud on Kittos gun definitely seem to make the accuracy worse.
-Accuracy was sub par at 100 yards. And i'm sure 50. With the shroud on, bullets struck from center to top to bottom of target paper. I see why most guys don't post pics of groups. It's really not worth showing.
-Even though the display is off the majority of the time, Kitto said that the batteries go dead in a couple of days. Even if he does not shoot them gun for 2 or 3 days, the batteries still die. I asked him if the gun had a small watch battery in it for backup memory purposes and he said that he did not think so. I agreed with that because if the gun did, his AA's would not go dead so quickly.
-After really thinking about the electronics on the gun or at least the way Benjamin/Crosman has them set up, it seems to be 50% a waste and 50% helpful. Traditional big bores are meant to be shoot ON HIGH POWER ALL THE TIME. But there is nothing wrong with adjustable power on a big bore. On the Rogue though, the only difference between lo to med it 10 fps. Then from med to high is another 10 fps gain. That's silly to me or maybe i just don't fully understand the programming. The only thing i see remotely helpful with the settings is that you can get the 10 shots or whatever on low power at about 100 FPE. But being a long time big bore shooter and owner, why do i want to shoot a big bore airgun on MINIMUM power? It's not why we buy them and at NOSLER'S ridiculous cost per bullet, who can afford to plink every day. But that's just me.
-The accuracy really left me numb and because of the short day, I really wanted to figure the gun out. To be honest, shooting an airgun should not have been this hard or took this long. Every single airgun i've owned especially my big bores have only taken a handful of shots to determine that they were accurate. Even with new molds and freshly casted bullets, my big bores shot very well and that was with a mold i had never casted from or even shot that specific bullet before. With the ROGUE, YOU GOTTA WORK AT THIS THING.
The Rogue could really be something if: Crosman got a good barrel supplier. There is no other way to look at it or say it. Why did they not even use the LW 9mm barrel. The gun is already 1300 bucks and a LW barrel would have helped justify that cost.
... you should be a regular guest on mine ... heheh.