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[Hide] (47.3KB, 2000x1334) >>926
I like some of the Primary Arms stuff. I think they sell very solid products at their price point in the market. That having been said, their reticles don't always appeal to me very much. Currently whoever is making those decisions seems to have seen a Russian 1P71 "Rakurs" rifle optic and said "Yes! Chevron all the things!"
Arguably they're better than some of the stuff they came up with previously. This reticle is from one of their first-generation prism sights. People at ARFCOM called it the Angry Koala. It is everything I dislike in a reticle. I find it cluttered and busy, and I think it is overdesigned. fur a while they sold scopes with what they called the "KISS" reticle, which was straight-up yoinked from the Rakurs sight except fur being in MRAD instead of MOA. I liked it, at least conceptually, though I never had one. I and was giving serious consideration to bidding on a used one in an online auction but the prices got too high too fast fur me. The KISS reticle was discontinued. Maybe it didn't sell. It's a pity.
Currently Primary Arms seems to have a mania fur sticking an illuminated chevron front and center on top of an assortment of extremely busy reticles that have lead indicators and rangefinding scales and wind hold indicators and holdover points and everything but a "check engine" light. And the holdover points unavoidably have built into them assumptions about the trajectory, which in turn require the designers to assume one single specific height over bore, one single specific barrel length, one single specific bullet design, one single specific muzzle velocity, etc., etc., which is entirely practical if you're writing up a design fur the Big Army that's going to purchase 1.2 million of them and slap all of them on 14.5" M4 carbines loaded with M855 Ball.
I know some guys really love all that stuff but I've noticed that even the US military, that drove the creation of such things in the first place, is getting away from all of that. Look up infurmation about the Eotech Vudu line of FFP LPVOs the Army is buying. The reticle is a very plain, very generic looking mildot scale in the center that's visible and usable on max magnification, with a big ring around it that becomes the principal aiming tool when you crank magnification down to 1x fur close work.
In my attitudes toward such things I am more of a minimalist. Part of the reason is that I'd just be sticking it on a .22, so a bunch of holdover points that only work with an M4 and M855 would just be clutter fur my application. Part of the reason is that I like simplicity fur its own sake. There is, or maybe used to be, an optics importer using the name Mueller, I assume to invoke memories of prewar German manufacturers of super-high-quality super-expensive optics, fur their line of imported Chinese scopes. They had a 1-4x second focal plane LPVO in their product line whose reticle was almost ideal. It was an etched glass reticle with just a dot at the center, nothing else, and it had illumination. Unfurtunately the dot was 4 MOA at maximum magnification and 16 MOA at 1x. It was the size of a basketball. When I pawled one I got the distinct impression that if I were shooting at something far enough away to need magnification, the dot was so big it'd probably obstruct it partially or completely, even at maximum magnification. If it had been 4 MOA at 1x and 1 MOA at 4x it would have been ideal. Maybe someone at the importer really liked yuge dots. Maybe someone thought the most likely buyers were going to put them on shotguns loaded with slugs fur deer season in thick brush country. Maybe someone at the plant in China misread the dimensions on the diagram and said "差不多" and shipped them anyway. There's a lot of stuff going on with Chinese products, well beyond the world of optics, that is inexplicable without assuming either a cargo-cult mentality, or that they just don't care enough to put in more than the bare minimum of effurt so long as the fa rangs keep buying.