Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Electronic "Scope" - Heavy Recoil

Ladies and Gents,
Anyone using an electronic "scope" (Red Dot or other) on a heavy recoiling weapon?
Best Wishes

I have. I've used an old (1981) Tasco, a new Tasco, Trijicon's, an original Armson OEG, Bushnell's and an "Accupoint" (I think that was the name).

The Armson OEG was great, except that the translucent hemispherical front cover came off and was lost. The old Tasco simply fell apart like a broken Thermos bottle.

High quality, modern "red dot" sights such as the Aimpoints, Trijicon's and EOTech's should handle pretty much anything the gun can take.

In my experience, it was not the recoil severity that destroyed the red dots, rather the number of cycles. Most of the red dots that I have seen fail did so on .22LR's or .223's (5.56x45mm). The second biggest cause of red dot failures was water.

If you pay for quality optics (aimpoint or eotech) they will take plenty of abuse. I have seen them used on the M240 (belt fed 7.62) and vehicle mounted .50s with no problems at all.

My WAG on the subject is that red dots are inherently tougher than standard scopes. Most of my experience with red dots is with magnum handguns, which might be a tougher test than rifles. A guy needs to spend some dough to get a standard scope that will hold up to a hard kicking handgun, but almost any red dot will hold up fine.

Gentlemen,
Thank you for your input. We are leaning towards the Aimpoint CompML3. They state it will function at -50F which is an important (though not critical) consideration for us but nothing is chisiled in stone as yet. We plan on mounting it on an Alexander Arms .50 Beowulf.
Best Wishes