I was on the Royal Princess Cruise ship going around the British Isles. The ship has a firearm simulator that they call the Bullseye Shooting Simulator. The Bullseye Shooting Simulator is only open 1 hour each day. The downside, is that it is often open while I was out for a shore excursion. I checked it out during our days at sea.

The simulator is made by a Swedish company called Marksman Training Systems AB. The program is their ST-2 Indoor Simulator. It is like the old Nintendo game Duck Hunt but on steroids. It uses a projector to display the image and video on the wall of the simulator room. It has a dummy shotgun tethered to the computer and has a light sensor hanging off the barrel. The shotgun felt like a fully loaded semi auto shotgun in terms of weight and size. The trigger was horrible. But it is a giant video game controller. The trigger pull was long and crunchy and breaking the sear was hollow. There is no short reset, you have to release the trigger all the way forward for it to reset. If you did not let the trigger reset to the very end, and you pulled the trigger, it would not register the shot.

There were two sets of games. Depending on the day, you could be shooting rifle targets or shotgun targets. For the rifle targets, they mounted an Aimpoint Pro to the top picatinny rail. Each shooter would calibrate the gun and optic first. Once calibrated you would shoot some simulated cans. The program allows you to set the distance. The cruise crewman would set it for us. He or she would operate the computer in order to reset the targets or to change parameters. Such as the balloon targets. There would be balloons rising from the bottom of the screen. The crewman can control the speed and direction the balloons showed up. At first you are shooting one balloon at a time. Then when that round was finished, the crewman would change the settings to have all balloons rise in a staggered order. After the balloon shoot, they would display a stationary paper target and you have to shoot 10 shots as best as you can at the bullseye. I took a knee and benched the shotgun and got a perfect 10 shots.

The shotgun games were more fun. I was curious to see how well this simulator would simulate clay birds. Would the simulator take distance and speed into consideration? Yes it did. I had to lead my targets just as I would shooting real clay targets. One helpful aspect of this simulator is that, after every shot, the simulator would show a quick blown up review of where you shot was in relation to the target. So you get feed back where you shot missed or hit.

One thing I noticed is that they do not allow shooting of simulated live animals. If you go to Marksman Training Systems AB website, you can see pictures of games that simulate hunting. There were options for a rabbit shoot but they were not allowed to access it. I thought perhaps it might have been like a sporting clays rabbit, but considering how they would not let us play that game it must be shooting virtual rabbits.

Here is a video of my dad and I shooting the Trap simulator.