Hi. I want to ask some questions about electronic sights on handguns. I have a specific application in mind for a dot sight and I'm wondering if anyone has any advice.
I've made an impulse purchase, which I hope I won't regret, of a Keltec P17. While I was reading up on them I found a guy who makes CNC milled aluminum optic plates for them. There are two great big screws on top of the slide in front of the rear sight. Apparently they hold a conventional-slide-shaped plastic shroud over the actual steel bolt. You take those screws out, you put on the optic plate, you put threadlocker on the screws, you screw the plate down on the slide. Then you can put your optic on it.
The guy makes them in a bunch of patterns and styles. I went with RMSc because everyone agrees that optics made to fit other mounting patterns tend to be much heavier. Additionally, given the difference in footprint size and what I am assuming about the thickness of the metal based on what he told me about the RMSc plate, the C-More mount plate he sells probably doesn't weigh much less than 14g all by itself. I base this on looking up the standard optic footprint size and pretending his adapters are flat rectangular prisms of aluminum 3mm thick, and rounding down to the nearest half gram. That sounds dumb but it got me a guess of 9g for the RMSc plate while I was waiting to hear back from him.
Anyway, In my research I saw some threads on Le Plebbit where guys were talking about 3D printed optic plates for the P17, some weighing about three grams. A guy had tried a few different patterns of them with different optics on his P17. With one combination--I don't recall the particulars but I looked up the specs and I did the math--with that plate and an optic whose manufacturer said it weighed 30g, the gun ran fine, at least with the ammo he was using that day. He tried a different pattern plate and put a Holosun on it that was a big fat chonky boi of an optic, weighing 42.5g by itself. 45.5 grams of mass total added to the slide, and no, I don't know if he counted the mass of the screws and battery, resulted, he said, in somewhat less reliable functioning and some apparent ammo sensitivity. Maybe. "Or maybe I should have cleaned it and oiled it before that test. It was really dirty that day. I dno, lol." Another guy said that on his own P17, an optic-and-mount combination weighing 37g seemed to cause some functioning problems, maybe, or maybe the gun was dirty, or maybe it was low quality ammo, or maybe there's some burr on the internals making something important inside that one drag, and so on. It isn't much to work with but this is where I am.
And yes, I know, Kel-Tec sells a version of the P17 that has an optic already installed, either a Viridian RFX11 or a Crimson Trace CTS1550. They come with an RMSc pattern mount already attached and the front portion of the slide skellingtonized (spoopy!) to reduce weight, compensating for the added mass of the sight. But I'm compelled to tinker with stuff. Where's the fun in that? Where's the fun in this if I don't get to dremel some lightening grooves inside the top of the slide to make it run? Also it doesn't have a rear sight, probably to save weight, and I might in the future want to remove the dot and take it to the range without it.
I promise, I'm getting to a point.
I emailed the guy who makes the CNC machined plates and he was kind enough to weigh one for me. He said the RMSc one weighs 8.7 grams. 34 minus 8.7 equals 24.3 grams, which I am taking as the probable upper bound on mass where I have a reasonable expectation of proper function. I know there are a lot more choices in RMR pattern optics, and there will be a lot more features, but RMR optics tend to be pretty heavy, and for this I need something light.
There was a guy on Reddit who had a spreadsheet of RMSc optics you could download from his Google Drive account and I started from there, but, you know, a lot of manufacturers don't have very complete lists of specs on their web pages. Some of them have no specs at all beyond what mount footprint it fits and the rest of the product page is a pep talk about how amazing it is. For that matter, I found more than one dot sight available to buy on Amazon whose manufacturer doesn't list it on their web page at all.
All that is preface.
I have a list of boxes I have been checking for the optic for this project. It needs to be sooper dooper lightweight, even by RMSc optic standards. That's the absolute requirement. It absolutely has to be 24.3g or less in weight, preferably as little weight as possible. In the nice-to-haves, I want it to be green rather than red, because I've got a touch of the 'tism. That's astigmatism, if you were wondering, and I am generally able to see a green dot more sharply than a red one. And I want a circle dot reticle rather than just a plain dot, because it's clearly visible to my eyes at lower brightness. If the dot is too bright my astigmatism causes me to perceive it as blurry and distorted. And I want top or side battery compartment access rather than the battery being in the bottom.
This was difficult, because a lot of manufacturers, as I said, put up product pages for the sights they sell that don't actually have much information at all. I've spent a bit of my spare time looking up product pages, looking up Amazon and eBay listings, and trying to gather enough information about enough different optics to make a list. Starting with that spreadsheet, I added an additional column to it for weight. There are an awful lot of very different looking sights on Amazon where under "product information" it says "weight: 1oz," and I see that repeated so often that I think some sellers are just guessing and putting in a figure with which they assume their prospective customers will be comfortable rather than weighing them. If it's one ounce, 28.3g, then it's over the weight limit I've set by 4g. If it isn't, then I don't know what it weighs and have no information. So I'm discarding all of those. Some of these products look like they might be suitable, but if I don't know what they weigh, I have to cut them from the list.
Special mention has to go to Vector Optics, which not only puts almost no information about their products on their web page, but also has their own made-up names for optics footprints that nobody else in the business uses. It took me a while to figure out that when they say "MGT Footprint" they're talking about what everyone else on the planet calls RMSc. Their web page seems to be getting served up from a Commodore 64 connected to a dialup modem on a noisy analog phone line in Guangdong Province. I think their "Frenzy-S" line optics are RMSc compatible--I think, anyway--but their web page doesn't show me much other than "Loading" animations that never stop, thumbnail images that don't connect to anything, and links that don't do anything when clicked, so I dno, lol. They could have some products meeting my criteria, or not. I can't even see anything usable in the Wayback Machine, going back as far as 2020. I think they need to have a talk with their ISP. People are selling their products on eBay and Amazon, but there's not a whole lot of information beyond the sales-pitch stuff, and some of them have RMR optics listed as RMSc and vice versa.
Anyway, I ended up with a list of over eighty different RMSc sights, which is a lot more than I thought existed in Current Year, and I'm sure it's not an exhaustive list. It's possible that many are identical sights from the same Chinese factory, just with a different logo painted on the side, being put in boxes with different names printed on them. Nonetheless I have at least something to work with.
The Ruger Readydot, at under 9g, is appealingly lightweight, but the dot is 15 MOA, it's red, it's fixed, and it's illuminated by fiberoptics with ambient light only. It's really clever but that's gonna be a no from me, dawg. A number of others had really bad battery life, and so on. And, though it may offend some, I'm not going to consider a $400 Holosun, a $550 Aimpoint, or a $700 Meprolight for a <$200 .22 plinker. The vast majority of RMSc sights have bottom battery compartments, which I dislike very much. The vast majority are available in red only. Very few circle dot reticles are available at all in RMSc, most in red only. Others, like the ADE Nuwa, were removed from the list for things like really bad battery life, or the CVlife Wolf Covert, for weighing almost 40g, unless that's a typo on their web page. but I have a list now.
At the top I have placed the ADE Nuwa Pro. It's 15.5g and has a top battery compartment, and it's available with a green circle dot reticle. It's about a hundo on Amazon.
The only optic with a red circle dot reticle that made the weight cut and didn't have a bottom battery compartment was the C+H Precision Weapons EDC. It is priced far above what I'm willing to spend on an optic for a .22 plinker.
The Cyelee CAT0-G is a green dot with a side battery compartment that makes weight at 22.8g, though not by much.
Optics with a green dot that are 20g or less are the ADE Spike, Gorilla Optics Samaritan, Nightstar PR17G, Ohhunt RD U1, Primary Arms 21mm Micro, Swampfox Sentinel, Viridian RFX-11, Viridian RFX-15, and Zerotech Thrive HD, but all of these have bottom battery compartments. Of these the lightest seem to be the RFX-11 and the 21mm Micro.
So, does anyone have any experience with any of these optics? My tiers are:
ADE Nuwa Pro
Cyelee CAT0-G
Viridian RFX-11
Primary Arms 21mm Micro
ADE Spike, Gorilla Optics Samaritan, Nightstar PR17G, Ohhunt RD U1, Swampfox Sentinel, Viridian RFX-15, Zerotech Thrive HD
Or maybe someone knows of more choices in green circle dot optics that fit RMSc, weigh 24.3g or less, don't have bottom battery compartments, and won't cost more than the gun they're mounted on. Or maybe someone has weight figures for the Crimson Trace RAD Micro, Foxarmy FXV22, Foxarmy FXV22 Pro, or Victor Optics Frenzy-S.[Expand Post]
Thanks.
>in b4 "just use the iron sights, faggot"