Originally Posted by Formidilosus


First a bit of background-

Anyone can think anything they want about testing, repeatability, legitimacy, or relevance of how to evaluate a scope. The reality is I evaluate them as needed for field use. Will a 12” drop on a padded mat pass strict peer review in a controlled study? No. But it is absolutely a legitimate test to tell if a scope will hold zero: if the mounts and gun are beyond reproach. I was the lead on the most intensive and largest scope evaluation/test that has ever been conducted within the DOD- 18 months, 200,000 rounds with every single legitimate scope in that category being tested. For the first time scopes were tested for absolute function with no bias whatsoever by knowledgeable end users- not engineers that have no idea what we do with aiming devices. Tracking, adjustment error, zero retention, return to zero, side and top impacts, longevity under recoil, SFP vs FFP, mil vs MOA, and operational performance. Scopes were zeroed on guns with brand new barrels with a certain lot on ammunition and checked for zero retention constantly with only that lot.

Only two scopes came out of that not having failure- Nightforce and SWFA. The results of that project is being used by two major entities of the DOD to shape what and how they test optics.



This is very interesting to me.

Are the testing and results something that can be made public? It would be very interesting to see which scopes failed and in which area(s) they failed.