I'll try my best not to speak out of my butt here...
Inherent to short body scopes (think ultra short) and high erectors (above 6x) is the battle with the short focal length of the design, this short focal length is what causes the tight eyebox, narrow DOF and finicky parallax - think constantly having to adjust between varying distances. One of the ways to fix this is to design a longer scope body (thereby increasing the focal length) but many manufacturers see the success of other short body scopes (like Schmidt's Ultra Shorts, ZCO's 4-20, March 4.5-28x52, NF NX8 2.5-20, et al) and have designed higher (top end) magnification scopes with shorter bodies which for the dynamic shooting competition world I think is the wrong direction. Shorter scopes are desired for clipon use, but unless PRS/NRL starts introducing night competitions I do not see these style of competition sports needing short body scopes. Many shooters do not understand the tradeoffs with these short body designs and high erectors, on paper they sound great - "who wouldn't want a shorter scope with more magnification?" until you realize the compromises that have to be made in the optical design in order to meet this criteria, and for those that have recognized this, they gravitate towards the more traditional scope design with a longer body and 5x or less erector, only recently has the industry broken the 5x barrier with a very forgiving design with a 6x erector as seen in the new 6-36x56 designs.
In my opinion (and it is certainly just that), Kahles took the wrong queues when designing this scope, and I say that purely based on their marketing material like the cheesy video that started out this thread, watch that video again and catch the terms they are using. Almost right off in the video they mention that this scope is aimed directly at the competition shooting market, but the design of the scope is a serious deviation of the scopes that have been successful in PRS/NRL over the years, scopes like the S&B 5-25x56, the TT 5-25x56, the NF ATACR 7-35x56, Leupold Mark 5HD 5-25x56, ZCO 5-27x56 and now the Vortex RG3 6-36x56 and likely the Schmidt 6-36x56 (thought the Schmidt acceptance will be hindered due to neutered FOV in US version as mentioned previously). Of all these the ZCO is the shortest with the Vortex RG3 not far behind but being such a new scope may take a bit for others to recognize its benefits and adopt it.
Here are the areas that Kahles has missed the mark (specifically relating to dynamic shooting sports like PRS/NRL)
- 8x erector - why? Nobody was asking for 8x, for most in PRS/NRL the sweet spot for 98% of all your shooting is between 10x-20x, who has been asking for 3.5x for PRS/NRL?
- Short body - why? These are competition rifles, outside of aesthetics, PRS/NRL have not been saying, "we need shorter scopes".
- Finicky Eyebox (as reported by Burdy and Area419) - this is one feature that the majority of dynamic shooting sports shooters request, a more forgiving eyebox due to restricted positions during certain stages.*
- There are others but I'll refrain from bringing them up because at this point they are conjecture due to the design and I'd rather wait to see how it does.
- 50mm objective - look at all the top scopes from PRS, they are all 56mm objectives because larger objectives tend to provide better eyebox experience; however, with such a short body there are some complications with larger objectives when trying to control other aspects of the design, by reducing the main objective you can somewhat help out some of these other areas of compromise.
* What's frustrating is the marketing terminology that Kahles is using on their website:
The above clearly states "exceptionally comfortable" but we now have two reputable sources indicating this may not be the case so one has to wonder what was the baseline for making this statement. Also, using the word "perfect" with regard to optical performance is really pushing the boundaries because no optical system is perfect...
One last point of clarification, all the above is in reference to a scope optimized for dynamic shooting sports, I think this scope will still have application within the shooting community but thus far it does not sound like the PRS/NRL slayer the Kahles marketing team is claiming it will be. If eyebox finickiness is around the NF NX8/March 3-24 level I can live with that, but if it is worse than these scopes then that will definitely hurt adoption.