Wednesday 23 January 2013

Done to Death, The Red Dot

Everywhere I look it seems that someone has their own red dot sight. The exteriors all look different but inside it is the same plain old red colored dot. It seems that Aimpoint in particular will put out different shaped optics all molded to the same height that, in the end, all do the same thing.
The term “Combat Sexy” comes to mind where having the latest red dot (which is functionally the same as past generations) is akin to a Cosmo girl having the latest fashionable purse.
If I was to write a list of all the red dot sights that were functionally the same and had you read it out load you would get so bored you would stop reading my blog and do something more interesting like painting the fence or taking your wife out to shop for make-up.
Oh! I can hear them now, th loudest detractors being the Aimpoint fanboys as I have mentioned Aimpoint by name:
“I will have you know that the M3 has a better blah blah blah of blah blah then the M2 so it is not about style”
Or
“The ____ was chosen by _____ because blah blah blah”
I am not here to debate these things . I am here to say that the concept has been done to death.
I suppose what really gets me is a system that keeps being made over and over again with the same flaw; The Dot.....
Make it too big and you lose precision. The Tasco propoint has a 5 MOA dot which means at 100m it obstructs 5” of your target.
Make it too small and it is too slow to use as the eye searches for the dot.
The Russians have a sight. It is multi-reticule and I’d say they got 2 of them just right; the circle-dot and the chevron. Its other 2 reticules seem either mundane (the dot) or silly (the dot-chevron) so I will not talk about them here.
The circle dot is my favorite. So much in fact that my company’s product (The Advanced Reflex Optic) uses it. The Circle-Dot takes advantage of the brain’s ability to line up circles. It allows you to use a smaller dot because the large outer ring draws the eye to the middle.
The chevron is really good as well but it is quite hard to find an optic that uses it… I will fix that problem but I digress. The idea of the chevron is it acts as a pointer that points at the space you are shooting at. The advantage is, there is nothing actually covering your target as the point of aim is set right above the tip.