What do you guys think are the most durable LPVOs? I am considering a Tango 6T SFP but I am wondering if it is worth saving up for the ATACR.
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I have run a couple of Trijicon LPVO's on guns for 6 plus years with zero issues, personally I think that they are the best bullet proof, best glass at the price especially if you buy pre loved versions.
I have considered upgrading to the NF ATACR but havent yet, I have no doubt looking through my other NF glass that the ATACR LPVO would be a step up from the Trijicon I am just not sure for me at least whether its worth all that much $$ for a LPVO, I spend it on distance glass but for run and gun........... but it depends on you, your wallet and your intended uses. If it was going on a service weapon I would go with the ATACR.
I have considered upgrading to the NF ATACR but havent yet, I have no doubt looking through my other NF glass that the ATACR LPVO would be a step up from the Trijicon I am just not sure for me at least whether its worth all that much $$ for a LPVO, I spend it on distance glass but for run and gun........... but it depends on you, your wallet and your intended uses. If it was going on a service weapon I would go with the ATACR.
ATACR is nice and it appears durable. I have an old Leupold M/RT 1.5-5 that I used in Iraq 05/06 that I still use to this day. I also use a Steiner M8Xi that I have used on some local matches and two run and gun biathlon events that has held up very well so far.
What are your plans for the optic? I am pretty careful with my stuff (relatively).
What are your plans for the optic? I am pretty careful with my stuff (relatively).
The Trijicon VCOG is advertised, by Trijicon, as durable. From their website: With a forged 7075-T6 aircraft-aluminum-alloy housing, the VCOG® is an exceptionally durable and nearly indestructible sighting system.
See this argument over and over on places like arfcom and the like.
That "thick candy shell" ain't worth a hill of beans if the internals are shit. Not saying the VCOGs are (though I've seen a few in the early years that wouldn't hold zero). Though most LPVO's are "set and forget", shock and g's don't care what it's wrapped in....once the internals are fucked, you're done. And if it's bad enough, you're fucked no matter what you got.
S&B's housing is soft as fuck (bent the tube objective end of my tube on my 1.5-6x20mm with the rifle hitting the deck and bent it back with my fingers) but I'm pretty sure they don't mess with aluminum or brass internals and stick with steel (hence the weights of their LPVOs). There's some old, beat to fuck DRMO 1.1-4x20's floating around in LE hands that still work/track.
I beat the fuck outta this one for several years and it rode around in a vehicle for about 4 straight years:
Best to understand what the most likely mechanism of failure is and if it's a complete "deadline" or merely a reduction in use/feature. How dependent does one want to be on the illumination/electronics package?
A lot of failure to hold zero or significant shift?
Tracking problems?
fiber optic wire dislodging (Razor HD2 1-6)
getting stuck on "CC" parallax (S&B CC, Exos, and dual CC)
LED emitter shift (S&B Short Dots)
These are precision instruments with small parts...and if treated as such, they can last quite a while.
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See this argument over and over on places like arfcom and the like.
That "thick candy shell" ain't worth a hill of beans if the internals are shit. Not saying the VCOGs are (though I've seen a few in the early years that wouldn't hold zero). Though most LPVO's are "set and forget", shock and g's don't care what it's wrapped in....once the internals are fucked, you're done. And if it's bad enough, you're fucked no matter what you got.
…
I have heard of unexpected VCOG failures. Enough that it puts me off from them. Doesn’t help that they’re generally not very appealing, feature-wise. Though I’d rather hear reports from USMC armorers before condemning them for not living up to their durability claims.
Trijicons variable optics have disappointed me as a whole aside from what I saw from the demo sample that couldn’t make it a half day in an OE carbine course.
I think many speciously impose the Acogs reputation onto them when that aren’t the same animal. And as I noted the aesthetic similarities likely feed into that.
They do have decent CS though. S&B generally does too if it’s not “elective”. Vortex too. Of all the companies, Leupold is the only one that I personally had struggled with.
I think most of the popular lpvos made in low in Japan will be pretty solid. Here are a few examples : primary arms plxc, vortex razor, nightforce nx8. And nf atacr for a assembled in USA if I'm not mistaken.
The SAI, NF NXS/NX8, and the other upper-mid tier that do not fully depend on the electronic package to be effective would get my vote for best bang for the buck. Razor 1-6 deserves mention as well
Great point. This gets me thinking that an argument could be made that a 2nd focal plane razor 1-6 for example could be thought of as more durable than a razor 1-10 first focal plane based on the the 1-6 having a much more usable reticle at 1x without illumination than the 1-10 .
While this place is understandably pro-FFP, the 2nd FP LPVO makes more sense for most in that case. However, it's more to do with reticle design than mere focal plane. Despite my preference for S&B LPVO's, they're stupid for using skeletonized reticles on FFP LPVO's and wanting to be reliant on their LED emitter on 1x/1.1x given that has accounted for the majority of my S&B service returns for a variety of reasons related to the adjustment dial/LED emitter.
Some FFP's are still quite usable on their bottom end. I will note the CQBSS with the TMR was thought out in that respect for the 3x different thicknesses of crosshair where the user despite magnification always had some degree of visible crosshair to work with.
(The CQBSS might've been a contender for one of the more robust LPVO's...)
Hence, my stance on understanding what is likely to fail and understanding what one can or can not live without in regards to the optics specs/features.
For clarification, are you saying even excluding the demo that failed during the carbine course, Trijicon’s LPVOs have disappointed you as a whole or did you mean to say they haven’t disappointed you as a whole with exception of the demo that went down?
I've had a Primary Arms PLXc 1-8 rattling around in a vehicle for a long time. Never had an issue and never needed to re zero it. For the money it's a damn solid scope.
So far so good on my 1-8 VCOG. Need more time to tell about the durability though. Its only been through one match and a few range sessions.
They’ve all disappinted me be it by image quality, eye box or something else.
Really liking the 1-6x transition KC1 reticle on the Steiner I picked up, but people seem wary of their reliability. I'm pretty careful with my rifles, but time will tell I guess.
I mostly wanted to stick with FFP because I hate introducing any additional thought into my shooting workflow if I don't have to.
Which is great if we were talking using an optic at 8x, 12x, 16x and 20x, but we're talking about an optic/reticle where any hold stadia is imperceptible below 4-4.5x and I'm willing to bet will never be used outside of MAX 6x magnification.
I say this having sung that VERY same tune for some time...and in all that time I never encountered this issue with any FFP with a 6x or 4x top end; nor have I been significantly hamstrung with a SFP 8x with mil-based reticle so long as it allowed me to dial elevation...
USE it if you like it...no shame in that.
Are you jumping it, diving it, or falling off the side of a mountain regularly with it?
If no, then its a stupid question to ask and even dumber rational to purchase one based on.
Probably not the ideal factor for selection but probably not as moot as you make it to be.
Mountains and parachutes aside a rifle has NEVER hit the deck from being in a rack next to the rifle of a Clutz who is all thumbs. Maybe lean it up against the truck and that friendly K9 decides he wants to give a sniff and knocks it over.
And no optic has ever shit the bed without suffering trauma…nope.
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On gas guns, scopes take much worse of a beating, especially AR-10s and piston guns with much higher spring weights and reciprocating mass slamming into the breech and barrel extension on the return-stroke. There are 3 spiked events on an accelerometer within a fraction of a second.
Scopes historically have been built to take linear rearward g forces from bolt guns, and the companies that cared about their reputation or had to meet military contracts on the bolt gun sniper systems did their due diligence in R&D to find what would hold together.
That quickly transitioned over to semi-autos with the prevalence of SR-25s and DMRs with tons of user feedback from units that actually have high-volume shoot schedules. The S&B Short Dot is an example that was born from those specific user requirements, with a lot of direct user-to-manufacturer requests.
The optics companies I’ve talked with said in order to make a durable variable power scope for use on gas guns, they had to use epoxy to set the lenses and optics modules in-position in the tubes and inner tube, otherwise they come loose under fire and reciprocating mass impacts that shock the scope in both directions. I think Vortex even developed their own CNC machine to do the epoxy application for their lenses and modules to ensure uniform application of the bonding compound, which used to be hand-applied over 10 years ago.
Tom Beckstrand wrote an excellent article on this after visiting as many scope manufacturers as he could and getting access to their engineers to discuss why they did things the way they did. He covered fast vs slow scopes, SFP and FFP internals, different company engineering philosophies, optical element materials, grinding, coatings, polishing, lens count, erectors, magnification mechanics, Side Focus vs front focus, diopter adjustment, elevation and windage mechanics, springs, reticles, knobs, etc.
NightForce and Vortex (higher end lines) seemed to address those semi auto durability issues the best at the time, especially if you wanted to run an AR-10 or SCAR.
One of the other shooting communities who saw this problem early-on were the .50 BMG shooters who shot their Barretts a lot. They broke a lot of scopes until they started using NightForce.
I know NF also uses Titanium leaf springs in their erectors that are heat-treated into the bent position, then compressed for a month, then allowed to go back into position. If they don’t return to heat-treated position, they are rejected and don’t go into the scope.
So when a company emphasizes the construction of their outer tube, that’s just a given. The inner components and how they are mounted and manipulated are very difficult to get right.
Scopes historically have been built to take linear rearward g forces from bolt guns, and the companies that cared about their reputation or had to meet military contracts on the bolt gun sniper systems did their due diligence in R&D to find what would hold together.
That quickly transitioned over to semi-autos with the prevalence of SR-25s and DMRs with tons of user feedback from units that actually have high-volume shoot schedules. The S&B Short Dot is an example that was born from those specific user requirements, with a lot of direct user-to-manufacturer requests.
The optics companies I’ve talked with said in order to make a durable variable power scope for use on gas guns, they had to use epoxy to set the lenses and optics modules in-position in the tubes and inner tube, otherwise they come loose under fire and reciprocating mass impacts that shock the scope in both directions. I think Vortex even developed their own CNC machine to do the epoxy application for their lenses and modules to ensure uniform application of the bonding compound, which used to be hand-applied over 10 years ago.
Tom Beckstrand wrote an excellent article on this after visiting as many scope manufacturers as he could and getting access to their engineers to discuss why they did things the way they did. He covered fast vs slow scopes, SFP and FFP internals, different company engineering philosophies, optical element materials, grinding, coatings, polishing, lens count, erectors, magnification mechanics, Side Focus vs front focus, diopter adjustment, elevation and windage mechanics, springs, reticles, knobs, etc.
NightForce and Vortex (higher end lines) seemed to address those semi auto durability issues the best at the time, especially if you wanted to run an AR-10 or SCAR.
One of the other shooting communities who saw this problem early-on were the .50 BMG shooters who shot their Barretts a lot. They broke a lot of scopes until they started using NightForce.
I know NF also uses Titanium leaf springs in their erectors that are heat-treated into the bent position, then compressed for a month, then allowed to go back into position. If they don’t return to heat-treated position, they are rejected and don’t go into the scope.
So when a company emphasizes the construction of their outer tube, that’s just a given. The inner components and how they are mounted and manipulated are very difficult to get right.
My Sniper Squad leader in Korea said when he was in 2/75 back at Fort Lewis, they had just gotten M24s and didn’t have exactly the best weapons case solution to jump them yet. He was told to just stuff it in an M1950 case and go, to which he said didn’t look or feel right, and that there was a high probability that the M24 would not stay in the case when his chute opened. They told him to shut up and rig it.
So upon exiting the bird and the opening of his chute, the M24 exited the M1950 and headed towards the earth at a much faster speed than he. He landed, recovered his chute and air items, rucked-up, went to the assembly area and told them what happened, and that he was going to go look for his M24 on the drop zone. After lots of searching, he finally found the butt plate sticking up out of the mud. The rest of the rifle was completely buried muzzle-first.
He spent a lot of time extracting the rifle from the ground, returned to the Company area, and began to disassemble and fully-clean the M24 and M3A Leupold fixed 10x scope. He had to toil for hours getting the mud out of the bore before even running patches through it, and took the whole day cleaning it. Once he got it all cleaned and reassembled, he had to go re-zero and see if everything was ok.
The zero had not even shifted......
Scopes take much more abuse just from riding on a rifle under fire than bumps and dings, though the knobs and any external mechanical features can be shorn off easily on many of them.
Here he is in Korea when we were doing Battalion Air Assault Live-Fire missions down south of the DMZ, the one with the NM M14. Great NCO.
So upon exiting the bird and the opening of his chute, the M24 exited the M1950 and headed towards the earth at a much faster speed than he. He landed, recovered his chute and air items, rucked-up, went to the assembly area and told them what happened, and that he was going to go look for his M24 on the drop zone. After lots of searching, he finally found the butt plate sticking up out of the mud. The rest of the rifle was completely buried muzzle-first.
He spent a lot of time extracting the rifle from the ground, returned to the Company area, and began to disassemble and fully-clean the M24 and M3A Leupold fixed 10x scope. He had to toil for hours getting the mud out of the bore before even running patches through it, and took the whole day cleaning it. Once he got it all cleaned and reassembled, he had to go re-zero and see if everything was ok.
The zero had not even shifted......
Scopes take much more abuse just from riding on a rifle under fire than bumps and dings, though the knobs and any external mechanical features can be shorn off easily on many of them.
Here he is in Korea when we were doing Battalion Air Assault Live-Fire missions down south of the DMZ, the one with the NM M14. Great NCO.
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You downplay the importance of a durable optic. Plenty of people have failures when camping, hiking, hunting, during competitions, and during courses.
Not just doing military things. Which, by the way, optics failures in the military can easily happen during much more mundane events than the examples you posted. You should know that.
No it's a moot point. Any lpvo over $500 is going to be robust enough for just about any shooting application someone here will need it for. Leupolds which are on the flimsier side of the spectrum have been a mainstay of military and LE rifles for many decades.Probably not the ideal factor for selection but probably not as moot as you make it to be.
Mountains and parachutes aside a rifle has NEVER hit the deck from being in a rack next to the rifle of a Clutz who is all thumbs. Maybe lean it up against the truck and that friendly K9 decides he wants to give a sniff and knocks it over.
And no optic has ever shit the bed without suffering trauma…nope.
What you are talking about is abuse, or accidents. It doesn't matter what scope you abuse, abuse can damage it. There are some designs that may be a bit more robust than others, but there is no bombproof optic.
As I said earlier, unless you are doing very high intensity activities that push the limits of the optics design, then it's the wrong question to ask. There will be no discernable difference to the average to high use user.
Something like the vcog or a 1-6 razor is about as durable as you are going to get but both will still get fucked up if you abuse it and don't treat it like an optic. Army thinks leupold and sig are good enough for soldiers so whose to say what's what anyway.
It's one of those questions when people ask it...you instantly know they don't know much about the subject and do not even know what the right questions are to ask. Better to find out what they really are after so you can help them select something to fit their needs.
Plenty of durable LVPOs out there. I can’t personally speak to any but the ATACR 1-8DMX. I beat the shit out of it at 2 gun, desert shooting, and bouncing around the truck while off-roading.
It sits in a badger C1 mount and it’s solid. RTZ is dead on as well.
Worth the extra couple months of saving to get it in my opinion.
Is it the best? Who knows. I run it out to 500 on 12” (black plate on dark brown dirt). 2Gun match has unpainted steel in shaded areas and dark backgrounds. Can see the targets just fine. Tracks as it is supposed to. Battery life is good but I swap batteries every 6 months so that’s not a concern.
Just my option…which is worth what you paid for it.
Best of luck in the search
It sits in a badger C1 mount and it’s solid. RTZ is dead on as well.
Worth the extra couple months of saving to get it in my opinion.
Is it the best? Who knows. I run it out to 500 on 12” (black plate on dark brown dirt). 2Gun match has unpainted steel in shaded areas and dark backgrounds. Can see the targets just fine. Tracks as it is supposed to. Battery life is good but I swap batteries every 6 months so that’s not a concern.
Just my option…which is worth what you paid for it.
Best of luck in the search
Steiner gets my money these days
It’s the little 1-4 that could and lives in my truck and when I’m home it’s my bump-in-the-night rifle
But optics fail so I always have BUIS and know how to use em’
It’s the little 1-4 that could and lives in my truck and when I’m home it’s my bump-in-the-night rifle
But optics fail so I always have BUIS and know how to use em’
My SAI is on a rifle that I treat like absolute garbage, and it has withstood the test of time. I'm definitely not saying it's the most durable optic, but it's certainly not fragile either, and would agree with "bang-for-buck".
I have three SAI6 scopes at this point including one of the very early ones that was treated like a red headed step child. It held up without any issues. The two new ones I have with mrad reticle have not yet been abused much, but it is coming. Optically, they look very good. Probably a little better than the original SAI6, but that might simply be sample variation. Assembly quality is spectacular on all three.
ILya
I wish mine was MRAD rather than BDC. Luckily Armament was nice enough to give me a conversion of BDC to MRAD on the 7.62 1-6.
I've been running an ATACR 1-8 without a single hiccup. Can't deny, though, that the Vortex 1-8s and 1-10s hold their own, especially backed by Vortex's customer service.
The SAI looks interesting. Do you think it has the durability of an ATACR? The SAI seems to be marketed more as a sporting optic rather than a duty optic.
Both come out of Japan spec’d by good mfgs. You can have 2x SAIs for the price of 1 atacr.
I was using an SAI on my patrol after I retired from swat. Didn’t seem like any less of a duty optic than the NF it replaced
I was using an SAI on my patrol after I retired from swat. Didn’t seem like any less of a duty optic than the NF it replaced
My Steiner 1-4 took a tumble out of the top of the safe onto concrete about 5 ft high. It has a dent so deep in the objective that you can just see some shadow of it on 4x. Mounted it back up and zeroed just fine. Just stuck a defender scope cap over it so I don't see the dent. It would have been more of a crying moment at today's prices but I paid $250 for it a few years ago before the price hike.
I beat the ever living shit out of both my VX6HD 1-6 and VXR Patrol 1.25-4 and it’s been 6 years and they’re both still trucking along which is more than I expected for their reputation and how light they are.
Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve had better luck with all my LPVOs (Some leupys, some Japan made LOW and a Chinese made Athlon ETR 1-10) than I ever had with all of my vortex PSTs and RAZOR LHT HDs
Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve had better luck with all my LPVOs (Some leupys, some Japan made LOW and a Chinese made Athlon ETR 1-10) than I ever had with all of my vortex PSTs and RAZOR LHT HDs
I think the problem with questions like this is that we have no independent, reliable data, to compare the pertinent LPVOs. We would need a sample size of 7-10 scopes from each company tested on the same rifle, each scope going through the same battery of durability tests (drops, mud, etc). It is a shame the US Army/USMC does not publish these sorts of results so consumers can understand what they are buying. There may be 3-4 other LPVOs that perform as well in these durability tests as the Sig Tango or ATACR or VCOG 1-8x.
Having said, I’ve been running a VCOG 1-8x for three years now on my SCAR-17. I have it in an ADM mount. Zero issues. I like the large eyebox, FOV and illumination.
Having said, I’ve been running a VCOG 1-8x for three years now on my SCAR-17. I have it in an ADM mount. Zero issues. I like the large eyebox, FOV and illumination.
Perhaps…if you use it far enough out but the thermal clip on crowd isn’t a massive market share at the moment, and I imagine price point for the lpvo isn’t as critical of a factor.
.50BMG has a weird recoil impulse. Obviously most optics weren't built for it. We used to destroy a lot of optics. I had a little Super Sniper that held up for about 1,000 rounds before catastrophic failure. To be fair I also have problems with my Nightforce NXS on my .50 BMG (bolt gun). I loose elevation. After contacting Nightforce they suggested I reset the zero stop which seemed to temporarily fix the issue.On gas guns, scopes take much worse of a beating, especially AR-10s and piston guns with much higher spring weights and reciprocating mass slamming into the breech and barrel extension on the return-stroke. There are 3 spiked events on an accelerometer within a fraction of a second.
Scopes historically have been built to take linear rearward g forces from bolt guns, and the companies that cared about their reputation or had to meet military contracts on the bolt gun sniper systems did their due diligence in R&D to find what would hold together.
That quickly transitioned over to semi-autos with the prevalence of SR-25s and DMRs with tons of user feedback from units that actually have high-volume shoot schedules. The S&B Short Dot is an example that was born from those specific user requirements, with a lot of direct user-to-manufacturer requests.
The optics companies I’ve talked with said in order to make a durable variable power scope for use on gas guns, they had to use epoxy to set the lenses and optics modules in-position in the tubes and inner tube, otherwise they come loose under fire and reciprocating mass impacts that shock the scope in both directions. I think Vortex even developed their own CNC machine to do the epoxy application for their lenses and modules to ensure uniform application of the bonding compound, which used to be hand-applied over 10 years ago.
Tom Beckstrand wrote an excellent article on this after visiting as many scope manufacturers as he could and getting access to their engineers to discuss why they did things the way they did. He covered fast vs slow scopes, SFP and FFP internals, different company engineering philosophies, optical element materials, grinding, coatings, polishing, lens count, erectors, magnification mechanics, Side Focus vs front focus, diopter adjustment, elevation and windage mechanics, springs, reticles, knobs, etc.
NightForce and Vortex (higher end lines) seemed to address those semi auto durability issues the best at the time, especially if you wanted to run an AR-10 or SCAR.
One of the other shooting communities who saw this problem early-on were the .50 BMG shooters who shot their Barretts a lot. They broke a lot of scopes until they started using NightForce.
I know NF also uses Titanium leaf springs in their erectors that are heat-treated into the bent position, then compressed for a month, then allowed to go back into position. If they don’t return to heat-treated position, they are rejected and don’t go into the scope.
So when a company emphasizes the construction of their outer tube, that’s just a given. The inner components and how they are mounted and manipulated are very difficult to get right.
Probably a solid optic for AR platforms is the Elcan. That thing seems to be the winner for durability.
With variable optics, you have lenses moving in a linear fashion....this is where the Elcan Spectre made me very uneasy given the supposed "zero shift" issues between 1 and 4x. I have to believe that over time, that switch function would indeed change slightly or incur some degree of play within the mechanism or optical alignment and ultimately have a variance in POI.
This is why I was sad to see the OS4x go, in today's market that thing with an ACRO or MPS would be a beast...provided one had a beer can handy for those ARMs levers
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