I know a lot of people who hunt with ARs chambered for the likes of 6.8SPC, 6.5Grendel, 300Blackout, etc.
For those applications, anything with more than two inches of eye relief is plenty.
I suspect that this will be an excellent scope for that use.
Personally, I am partial to the 6.5Grendel and it seems to work just fine on pigs.
I probably would not put this scope on a safari gun, but there are plenty of other scopes out there for that.
ILya
I don't disagree,but I can't for the life of me figure out why you wouldn't just design it with a slightly larger ocular if needed and at least 3.5" eye relief. I really prefer 3.75"-4" because it increases options on where it will work. I just see no advantage to such short ER at the disadvantage of maybe one ounce more weight.
As a general disclaimer, I do not do product development with SWFA. I have a cordial relationship with them, so I often get to see prototypes before they are released, but that is largely it.
If I were a betting man, I would bet that they looked at the one part of the hunting market that is actually growing and tried to make a scope for that application. I suspect, that they were also trying to get the weight under 10 ounces, so every little bit of weight saving makes a difference. As has been pointed out earlier, there is only so much lightening you can do on the insides before you sacrifice durability, so I suspect the eyepiece was the next logical place to streamline things without sacrificing quality.
To be brutally honest, if I were them, I would probably do the same thing. People simply do not buy 32mm objective scopes for conventional big game hunting rifles any more. If you want to introduce a lightweight scope, you have to look outside of the 30-06 boltguns.
I have seen this before: what people say they would do and what they actually do are not the same thing.
If I were to run a poll here on how many people would buy a 12 ounce 2.5-10x32 scope with 4" of eye relief and then went on to build that scope based on positive feedback, I would go bankrupt.
The number of scopes I would sell would end up at best one tenth of the number of people who said they would buy it.
ILya
