No, it is the way it came from Leica. This is the 3500.com, I have not changed it. My 1600 had a different black cap.
Weapon mounted LRF
- Thread starter BAO13
- Start date
It’s both funny and sad to watch the incremental moves towards systems integration in the firearms/electro-optics industry when you have also watched so many things happen in aerospace systems integration since the 1970s.
They’re still milking the bolt-on approach on military aircraft, but that has been made obsolete for the future.
The main ingredients missing are people. There needs to be someone who pushes people to achieve things they don’t think they can, designers separate from engineers, plus really good engineers. Really good electro-optical engineers get swept-up by aerospace. Electro-optical aerospace programs are tightly-controlled, so the lessons in dealing with metallurgy, optical elements, signals processing, computing, thermal management, power management, shock/resonant waveform harmonics mitigation, and ruggedizing aren’t openly shared because we don’t want to see the next fighter IRST from China or Russia with those advancements.
The money in aerospace fasteners alone chuckles at small arms, so it doesn’t get as much focus. On the DoD side in the US regarding soldier systems and electro-optics, you have billeted officer program managers who come along and maybe, maybe spend 2 years with a program. The first year is just getting them familiar with the concepts, stretching their mental capacity to internalize some of the applied physics, and getting them to understand what is happening. The 2nd year might include them parroting a few talking points they heard and some support, with the last few months focused on them taking leave or out-processing for the next drive-by assignment on their career path.
What you end up with is a series of programs, many of which are still cutting-edge decades later, that never saw the light of day. What we had with Land Warrior is just one example. The successive Blue Force Tracker and ATAK systems took the interface and dumbed it down regressively as far as the display goes, then added a hot thermal signature to the high center of mass of the solider, while the project managers and Army thought they were onto something magic. The network-centric warfare capes are game-changing, but you don’t have a “cave man” filter from experienced NCOs and tactical thinkers who can vet it. Even the senior NCOs get moved on to the next assignment that their branch overlords have them slated for based on some corporate-think career progression path that has zero relevance to bettering them or the Army.
Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of the “integrated” electro-optical aiming systems coming down the pipe, and they all are horrible-to-mediocre-at-best from a design and integration standpoint. Integration is easier-said-than-done, and really gets out of control when the soliciting agency is moving goal posts as frequently as it reassigns the project managers. That’s how you end up with design and execution turds that are uglier than Tracking Point and make....the Burris look elegant.
They’re still milking the bolt-on approach on military aircraft, but that has been made obsolete for the future.
The main ingredients missing are people. There needs to be someone who pushes people to achieve things they don’t think they can, designers separate from engineers, plus really good engineers. Really good electro-optical engineers get swept-up by aerospace. Electro-optical aerospace programs are tightly-controlled, so the lessons in dealing with metallurgy, optical elements, signals processing, computing, thermal management, power management, shock/resonant waveform harmonics mitigation, and ruggedizing aren’t openly shared because we don’t want to see the next fighter IRST from China or Russia with those advancements.
The money in aerospace fasteners alone chuckles at small arms, so it doesn’t get as much focus. On the DoD side in the US regarding soldier systems and electro-optics, you have billeted officer program managers who come along and maybe, maybe spend 2 years with a program. The first year is just getting them familiar with the concepts, stretching their mental capacity to internalize some of the applied physics, and getting them to understand what is happening. The 2nd year might include them parroting a few talking points they heard and some support, with the last few months focused on them taking leave or out-processing for the next drive-by assignment on their career path.
What you end up with is a series of programs, many of which are still cutting-edge decades later, that never saw the light of day. What we had with Land Warrior is just one example. The successive Blue Force Tracker and ATAK systems took the interface and dumbed it down regressively as far as the display goes, then added a hot thermal signature to the high center of mass of the solider, while the project managers and Army thought they were onto something magic. The network-centric warfare capes are game-changing, but you don’t have a “cave man” filter from experienced NCOs and tactical thinkers who can vet it. Even the senior NCOs get moved on to the next assignment that their branch overlords have them slated for based on some corporate-think career progression path that has zero relevance to bettering them or the Army.
Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of the “integrated” electro-optical aiming systems coming down the pipe, and they all are horrible-to-mediocre-at-best from a design and integration standpoint. Integration is easier-said-than-done, and really gets out of control when the soliciting agency is moving goal posts as frequently as it reassigns the project managers. That’s how you end up with design and execution turds that are uglier than Tracking Point and make....the Burris look elegant.
Armasight also made them. It looks like Armasight might be coming back?Yes, DFOOSKING’s observations are a perfect example of why these aren’t widespread in use and in availability. The only weapon mounted LRF ever marketed to civilians (as a stand alone LRF) was marketed to a small niche within the precision (day) shooting community. Most people have no idea why they might want one of these or how they might employ it.
Marketing is often the determining factor in product success more even than the product, and in this case, the product was discontinued before the manufacture realized who their real audience should have been.
At least 7 companies have already produced weapon mounted LRF: WILCOX, SWR (not even an optics company), Pulsar, Bushnell, L3, Vortex, and a European thermal company, so it’s quite doable and based on most of their pricing the economics aren’t hard.
Several of those are very high quality, a few are light weight, and a few are much cheaper than $5000, so to expect a reasonable intersection of those attributes in the very near future is well within reason.
In the mean time I’m stuck adding one RAPTAR per group buy
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A lot of failures or inactions are such a shame too. In my opinion they border on the edge of fraud waste and abuse. ie DoD really wants to focus on armor defeat with mass issued rifles, but anyone who has spent time in the infantry understands that highly protected targets are killed more efficiently with explosives. Don't get me wrong, I like cool rifles, but cars weren't ideated around the idea of faster horses. Maybe if our suite of 40mm munitions wasn't limited by ordnance dept fuze regulations we wouldn't have an issue with armor defeat.
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