Are Eotech and Aimpoint worth the money?

[natescout]

cant go wrong with an aimpoint.... just for battery life alone...

 

[HGUNHNTR]

Yes absolutely, there are few bargains in the optics department.

 

[X - Man]

Can anyone comment on how well these electronic devises will hold up when exposed to a EMP (electromagnetic pulse)?

A EMP attack is a realistic threat according to those who watch for threats against America.

What kind of position would the shooter find themselves in, if, the sights that they have been training with, are suddenly useless?

 

[halfded]

What kind of position would the shooter find themselves in, if, the sights that they have been training with, are suddenly useless?

That's where BUIS and co-witnessing come into play.

 

[Zerodefect]

I'm not certain that an Aimpoint has a board or IC chip. I think it's just an led, fancy glass, battery, potentiometer, and some coatings.

Would take an awlful strong EMP to cook an LED. Don't think that whether or not your scope still works would really be important. I'd be a bit more worried about the mushroom cloud and the wall of fire rushing towards me.



Keep in mind that with your Eotech or Aimpoint you still have BUIS. Which 9 times out of ten I wouldn't even bother flipping up until there was a pause in the fight anyway.

I can engage targets 15 yards away with just my tube. A weird bit of training you should try. If your optic fails during CQB you often are so close that anyone in your scopes FOV is a solid hit. Assuming you've tried it before and have a good grip/stock position.

 

[alfack]

That's where BUIS and co-witnessing come into play.

Or tritium and fiber optics

 

[Jorg Nysgerrig]

Can anyone comment on how well these electronic devises will hold up when exposed to a EMP (electromagnetic pulse)?

EMP reportedly doesn't affect battery operated devices without an antenna and/or cord at least 30 inches long. I have no idea if the rest of the rifle would act as an antenna and somehow arc into the electronics, but I suppose if you just left a spare EOTech off the rifle in the extremely unlikely event that you were in the area of an EMP, you would be ok.

 

[Bill_Rights]

Can anyone comment on how well these electronic devises will hold up when exposed to a EMP (electromagnetic pulse)?

I kinda agree with Jorg, but I don't think induced electrical charge on the long metal of a rifle will arc over to the electronic innards of an EOTech, Aimpoint, etc. For one thing, they are pretty much encased in metal, including their batteries, which will shunt all current around the inner electronics up to the point that the metal melts and a hole is formed. For another thing, there is no particular reason for an induced charge on any neighboring object to "want" to jump to a shrouded gunsight and sustain long enough to burn a hole through metal. The charge would sooner go to ground through just about anything else, like your body or a wet towel or a masonry wall or a nearby building wire run or almost anything. The optic screen has a super-thin conductive layer on it, but that'll burn through in nanoseconds to microseconds, turning it into a perfect insulator, forcing the main arc to go elsewhere. As I recall, these optic screens will work even if bodily cracked, so they'll work if they have a couple of 1/32" arc pits on their surface.

To put it in a little more perspective, to melt through an ~1/16" thick aluminum optic casing wall would take about the most powerful cutting torch you can imagine several seconds (let's say 1 sec) to accomplish. To do that in 1/100th second, which is more like the timescale of electric arcs, it would have to be 100X more powerful that the most powerful oxy-acetylene torch you can imagine. Well, at this point, if the charge electromagnetically induced on one, narrow 3-foot chunk of metal (your rifle) is THAT powerful, a) your body, your house and most of the things around you are going to get charge-induced, burned and melted equally badly and b) you are no longer talking "EMP" but rather you are near ground zero of an actual nuclear blast. (Sorry, you have voided the EOTech warranty - you lose...)

EMP damage is like lightning. Where it goes, nobody knows. Willy-nilly the most unexpected things will get "fried" and the most delicate things will survive. EMP is theorized to be crippling to an advanced technological society because enough critical infrastructure is electrically connected to miles-long conductors (the "grid"), which will develop the potential for brief, instantaneous megavolts and kilo-amperes discharges, due to their great length (which intercepts more moving lines of flux, induces more current, etc., just like in the text books we read and forgot). Exactly where adjacent to the grid the destructive discharges will occur is a will-o-the-wisp (the lighting thing again). But, theoretically, statistically, people speculate that among the random unpredictable destructive arcs, at least some critical controllers or nodes will be hit and disrupted, bring the entire network (the evil "grid") down. This is a tenuous, amateur, prankster, maybe terrorist type EMP attack. I think you're more likely to see purely mechanical toasters vaporized than AT&T data centers brought down for more than a day.

I am sure that the battle doctrine of real military forces will not rely on chance so much. EMP blasts would be directed very close to known "nerve centers" of critical networks, with 100% certainty of taking out just that local section of the network or grid, and knowing via intelligence and planning that this would weaken the overall network badly. Only if your EOTech (or your car or your person) was very near that targeted EMP detonation point would there be any likehood of damage.