How far do you plan on shooting in the dark without either a Night Vision Weapons Sight or Night vision veiwing goggles and a laser or white light?
The Army many moons ago tried the front sight only tritium posts, they were withdrawn because of breakages and contamination and for years arms rooms survays included finding radiation"hot spots" on rifle racks. Admittedly these were only a bit above background, but we were required to ID spots of higher than normal radiation on the racks.....something to think about. Although I have seen no numbers on it it was said that scores on the night phase of qualification did not go up significantly.
I did use a field expedient that worked for a bit after dark. On the regular M16A1 rifle I would put a small stripe of "Ranger Eyes" glow in the dark tape along the back edge of the front sight assembly, not on the post but on the back of the triangle so the post seemed to stick out of it in daylight. An even thinner piece was attached to the rear sight below the aperature pointing up and down rather than left to right. Looking through them at night gave a sort of glowing "T" with the lower leg sort of blobbly and out of focus. This allowed me to get the "windage" correct. Never got to actually shoot with them in the service, but later set up an AR-180 that way and had hits out to 35 meters or so with it in conditions where I could see a target outline but not the iron sights.
In 1977 I got my first Single Point, an unpowered model. This was an early Red dot "scope" using the occluded eye system where both eyes remain open and the non firing eye views the target and the firing eye looks into a closed tube with optics to see only the red dot. About two years later an other brand the original Aim Point OES came on the market and they first imported tritium power sources. Since the Single point used ambiant light to power the red dot, if there was no moon or considerable sky glow there was no red dot. As the scope body was a standard 1 inch scope tube I soon made a PVC pipe afair that included a AA battery powered "wheat light bulb" (hey this was in dinosaur days) to provide light for the Single point. I was unaware at that point that a simular concept had been used successfully with the earliest Single Points in the Prison camp raid in North Vietnam, so when I showed it to some one involved in that operation in 1979 they were suprised as it was not yet common knowledge that such had been done as everything about the operation was still classified. Later I obtained a Singlepoit of slightly different design with a tritium light source which has since died down enough to need outside power.
Trying to get US police and military interested in red dot type sights in the 1970's was frustrating. I did some shooting under flares (both using the flares for power and using my battery powered adaptor) with the Single point to about 200 meters and really liked the concept and effects. I was told by those that would listen that GIs and Joe cop would quicky find a way to break such devices and that they added bulk to the weapons.
I believe Redfield had a sight with red dot capability about 1974 or so that was used on a forward eye relief mount on Winchester 94s it was in many ways simular to the Single point but used a weird staggered two tube design. They apparently did not catch on with american hunters at that time though.
The newer see through scopes with red dots have some real advantages over the OES types (which I don't think anyone makes or sells anymore) though some do pose a securty problem in that there is some back glow out the front, but in my experience this is not much of a factor beyond rock throwing range for most scopes.
Listen to those encouraging you to get some sort of red dot.
Mean while look up the terms "Quick Kill" and "Quick Skill" the first a techneque of point shooting taught by the Army from 1968 through about 1975 and the second the Civilian equivilant used by shotgunners and sold as a kit by Daisy Air guns (came with unsighted BB"rifle" targets and guide booklet).
Good luck with it.
-kBob
