What Is Known As Sniper Scope

You're reading What Is Known As Sniper Scope, posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 12:10 am in Military Technology, on BrainBloggers at the Military blog. More after the jump.

Telescopic sight is often deemed a scope. Usually this technology is used on sniper rifles resulting in the name sniper scope. It is an optical device used to give elevated levels of accuracy using a point of aim for firearms, airguns and crossbows. Other sighting systems include the iron sights, reflex sights, and laser sights.

Up until the 1990s, military use of telescopic sights was limited to snipers because the optical components were expensive and extremely fragile. They had been used as early as the American Civil War on rifles, and even at earlier periods throughout history. The glass lenses are vulnerable to breakage, and environmental conditions including condensation, precipitation, dirt, and mud which can impair the external lenses. The scope tube also result in the rifle to feel more bulky. Snipers primarily used moderate to high magnification scopes with specific reticles that allow them to estimate the distance from the shooting point to the target.

Telescopic sights are sometimes not advantageous to the user because of its tactical limitations. Snipers require stealth and concealment to get near enough to their target. A telescopic sight can obstruct this because sunlight may inevitably reflect from the lens and a sniper raising his head to use a telescopic sight might inadvertently expose his position. The famous Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä relied heavily on iron sights rather than telescopic sights to eliminate some of these concerns. Harsh climate can also be a great problem for telescopic sights as they are less durable than iron sights. Many Finnish snipers in WWII prefered to use iron sights mainly because telescopic sights did not handle the very cold Finnish winters well enough.

The market for military telescopic sights made for military long-range shooting is very competitive. Multiple high end optics manufacturers are regularly adapting and enhancing their telescopic sights to meet the demands of military organizations. Two leading European companies in this field are Schmidt & Bender and Zeiss/Hensoldt. American companies that have made their mark in this area are Nightforce, U.S. Optics Inc. and Premier Reticles. These more costly sighting parts typically cost € 1500 / $ 2000 and above. Chief options for military telescopic sights are reticule illumination that may be utilized in less than adequate lighting conditions and those that include scope settings or ballistic relevant environmental measurements data that largely benefit the operator.

Nowadays numerous militaries issue telescopic sights to their infantry, normally compact, low-magnification sights appropriate for snap-shooting, like reflex sights. The US military issues ACOG, Aimpoint CompM2 and EOTech 553 combat optics. American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan generally buy their own combat optics. The British army uses the SA80 rifle with the SUSAT 4× optical sight as standard issue. The Canadian Forces standard C7 rifle has a 3.4 Elcan C79 optical sight. Both Austria and Australia use different forms of the Austrian Steyr AUG which has built an integral 1.5x optical sight since its implementation in the late 1970s.