Also note that making an attack roll in the d20 system implies that you are making an attack against someone while explosions are going off around you, while your friends are screaming and dying because some tentacled horror from beyond is eating their legs, while the guy you're aiming at is reading some sort of alien device that you just KNOW is going to haunt your dreams for the rest of your life if it goes off -- in short, while in the middle of combat.
I have no trouble saying that a given character might be able to hit a man-sized target 10 times out of 10 on a practice range. Heck, don't they have drill sergeants screaming in people's ears and other distractions there to try to add a certain level of verisimilitude? Do people still hit 10 times out of 10 the first time bullets start whizzing back from the practice range and making clods of dirt puff up in your face?
What matters for purposes of the game is not so much whether ordinary practice works well in the game -- because the game isn't about ordinary practice -- but whether you can come up with a mechanism to make it work on rare occasions when it might be important. For example, if your hero has to WIN a shooting competition in order to get to the finals, which are held on the island stronghold of the evil supervillain.
In that case, allow bonuses not normally available in d20 Modern, but ONLY for "target practice" purposes. Add synergy bonuses for ranks in Concentration. Allow the player to use a successful full-round Spot Check to convert yards into feet for range purposes (eg, a 500 yard shot is treated as a 500 foot shot). Let the player make an attack roll modified by Wisdom, each round, against AC15 to give himself a cumulative +2 insight bonus to attacks -- and the Dead Aim feat gives you a bonus on those rolls, or makes it +3 instead of +2 each time. And so on -- all kinds of cute things that you can easily rule would NOT work during the chaos, quick action, and frenzied peril of an attack scene.
The only danger would be if someone wanted to use these bonuses for making sniping attacks on unsuspecting living targets (the only real time in which you'd be making an attack roll without it being a combat situation) -- in which case, I'd probably say, "Fine, as long as you're fine with NPCs using the same rules on you."
For ordinary combat, the rules work fine. For extraordinary combat, try to extrapolate as necesary within the basic framework of the system.
-Tacky
