DarkLordOfOptics
Politics • Science & Tech • Sports
Guns, Optics, 2nd Amendment and resisting the Left in everything they touch.
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19 years since 9/11

I am not normally an early riser, but on September 11th of this year, somehow I got up early, located a pen and a coffee and started writing. Most of the writing I have done professionally has been of technical nature, so I welcome any and all suggestions you may have to make me a better writer. I found myself enjoying this far more than I thought I would.

"The purpose of terrorism is to terrify" Lenin

9/11 terrorist attack on the US accomplished that purpose. We were all terrified, pissed off and more than a little concerned. Even the Leftist Democrats who borrowed their primary military strategy of "bend over and push" from the French, temporarily developed some sort of affection for America and pointed out that this kind of terrorist action is a little uncalled for. It was a moment of great unity in the face of danger and it lasted a cool week or so. Honestly, I am no so sure there was all the much unity because the Leftists were simply a little concerned about being destroyed together with America; personal danger was never a part of their plan. Almost immediately the Left went over to their usual pre-occupation of undermining the US, the troops started planning a foray off to Middle East and Central Asia to kick some ass, and the political class set off to come up with the dumbest possible strategy to to use our military. The rest of us were left to quietly wonder whether the TSA is the final proof of the existence of the ever merciful G-d. It had to the Almighty's punishment on all of us since there is no evolutionary reason for it. The whole organization is basically one large recessive gene.
But I digress. It has been 19 years. We are essentially a generation away from 9/11 and two generations away from the end of the Cold War. It sorta stands to reason that when Soviet Union collapsed without fully destroying the Western Civilization, the Left in America felt that they suffered a bit of a setback. Soviet Union was an evil shithole and selling their usual Marxist power grab to the American people, with the Soviet Union exposed as the empire of slavery and misery that it was, became impossible.
The time period between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 was difficult for the Left. In order to continue the destruction of the US, the Communist Party pretty much had to re-label itself as the Green Party. That served two main purposes:
-they had some sort of legitimacy again with the low information emotion-based voter
-predictions of dire but unprovable future environmental disasters turned out to be a great way to launder money and weaken US economy.

The tragedy of 9/11 a generation alter was a gift from the above for the Left. Here was a golden opportunity to outsource the physical destruction of America to someone else without having to go give up DC cocktail parties. They could not support the Islamists immediately, but it did not take long to turn the whole thing around and add Islamophobia to the usual accusations of racism (luckily, an average Democrat voter had no idea that Islam is a religion, rather than a race so it could all be lumped into one). As is usually the case, the Left does not care about the actual plight of Muslims around the world. They just needed something else to hit America over the head with. If they cared about Muslims they'd be all up in arms about the Chinese oppression of Muslims in their Central Asian provinces. However, since they havn't yet figured out a good way to blame America for the Chinese sending a million Uighurs to re-education camps, it barely makes the news. Nearly twenty years after 9/11, having had all this time to corrupt young people who were not there to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union or the disaster of the Twin Towers coming down, we have Antifa and BLM, with vocal approval and support of the Democrat Party, doing what the Islamists could not: destroying our major cities.

After 9/11, most of us came together as a nation to condemn terrorism and support our country.
Are we going to do the same in the face of the domestic terrorism of Antifa and BLM?
I wish I knew the answer to that. I suppose we will know in November.

We ran away from Soviet Union 30 years ago, but there is nowhere else to run. This time we have to stay and fight.

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Vortex Defender XL Green

This is the second time Vortex' Defender XL crosses my path. I was very impressed with the original red dot version, so I was curious to see how the one with the green dot works for my eyes.
To get the details, see the attached video.
The cliff's notes version is that I am just as impressed with this one. In terms of collimation quality and parallax control, it is quite exceptional.
https://alnk.to/881BEV1

00:10:20
Primary Arms HTX-1 US Made red dot sight

I've had this RDS for a bit over two months now and I am beyond pleased with it.
Despite some spirited abuse, it keeps soldiering on.
https://alnk.to/1C9z5dw
It is a very nice RDS and being fully made in the US does not hurt either.

00:13:03
Delta Stryker 3.5-21x44 Wrap-up

This scope comes up a lot since I really like the configuration. It is time to do a final wrap-up of it.

It is one of my favourite scopes on the market today, especially for the money, since I naturally lean toward general purpose-ish designs. Still, while the 3.5-21x44 Stryker is relatively compact and light, it still clearly leans toward the precision side of things, which suites me very well.

https://annexdefense.com/optics-and-optic-accessories/delta-optics/

00:10:25
Uncooled Thermal with a little bit of history

There is, as always, an entertaining discussion happening in the Hide, but I do not feel like getting into another protracted argument about comparative merits of different uncooled cores with people who do not know a whole lot about them. I mentioned that BAE is getting out of the uncooled core business. The responses were interesting.

Still, I thought some of the background on uncooled cores is worth rehashing since I was around for most of it and involved in some of it. Hopefully, you'll find it informative. If not, this post will fade like many others before it.

Here is a little history on uncooled cores from an eyewitness.

I was working at Raytheon when it was starting out and one of my first projects over there was trying to figure out how to calibrate early uncooled cores for a military project that eventually ended up going into ENVG.

The uncooled technology was first developed by Honeywell and after a while they licensed it to a bunch of people. Honeywell developed the technology, but did not ...

Something to consider

I had an interesting conversation earlier today that made me think. I was approached by a company called TourHero.

Apparently what they do is organize various tours, trips, etc in partnership with different influencers.

The influencer does the marketing, i.e. convince his/her audience to buy this customized tour, while the company does all of the logistics.

The idea is that they get several people to pay extra for a tour package which pays for the influencer in question to come along and, apparently, make some money on top of it, depending on how much the influencer is able to get out of his/her followers.

How I got on their radar is very unclear since they are very focused on the Instagram crowd and I have a very small Instagram channel. https://www.instagram.com/darklordofoptics/

My best guess is that they saw the picture of my daughter and me after her antelope hunt and made some sort of an incorrect conclusion. Frankly, the types of the things that they push require levels of narcissism that I ...

Another G&A Article

For the few of you who still pay attention to print magazines, I have an article in the latest Precision Rifle Shooter, called "Optics For NRL Hunter". For those of you who have been following my stumbling and bumbling match shooting exploits, there isn't going to be anything new there. You know what I think on the subject.
However, I still get some sort of a weird nostalgic kick out of seeing something I write printed on paper.
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, my room doubled as a family library. I think it is some latent aftereffect of spending my childhood with books. Gen-Xers have a reputation of spending their childhood outdoors doing whatever mischief came to mind and that is true in my case, to some extent.
However, that is largely because at some point my mother got sick and tired of seeing me in the apartment with my nose stuck in the book. Every once in a while she would just search me for hidden books then kick me out of the house to go do something active. It ...

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Well, that was a doozy...

My original plan was to try to set up a hunt where my daughter will have her first memorable hunting experience without working too hard.

The choice of the pronghorn hunt was largely based off of my experience in that same area last year.

The way it went last year was quite straightforward.  We drove around until we saw a large pronghorn buck.  It was a solitary animal that decided to lie down in an open area to relax.  We made a short stock, crawled the last hundred yards or so, found a good spot about 350 yards away from the pronghorn and made the shot.

https://darklordofoptics.locals.com/post/6034347/well-that-was-a-nice-morning

This year, when I decided to take my daugher on the same pronghorn hunt on the day of her 14th birthday, I figured it will be somewhere along those same lines.  It kinda was, but not quite.

Still, it worked out nicely.

In the pciture:

Q Mini-Fix with 6ARC 16" Proof Research carbon fiber barrel

Q Jumbo Shrimp supressor

Gunwerks Elevate 2.0 bipod

Telson Toxin 3-18x50 riflescope

Leica Geovid Pro AB+ LRF binoculars

Pint-sized sticky Gamechanger bag

Unnamed pronghorn buck.  It will likely get a name once it's skull is euro-ed and is hanging on the wall.

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Arming The Children
A couple of very specific children that is

In case you were wondering, no, I am not starting an underage militia.

I do have two kids though and I am teaching them to shoot.

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Steiner C35 Gen2 Mount
from Annex Defense

The production version of the Annex Defense's mount for the Steiner C35 Gen2 thermal Clip-on is finally here.  At $1600 (when this is published), the clip-on is an absolute steal.

I've had it for a few days, but, me being the good old paranoid me, I spent some time shooting with it before posting anything.  I had a couple of days with it prior to last weekend's match in Montana and a couple of days after.  Another to pop it on and off a few times and get a couple of hundred rounds of 6.5Grendel through the gun to see if anything shakes loose.  So far so good.

The C35 Gen2 clip-on is sitting on my 6.5Grendel AR as a part of a long running "Only One" project that I have.  It pairs perfectly with the Steiner H6Xi 2-12x42 scope.

Here is what comes in the box from Annex Defense:

The order in which the whole thing comes togethe is pretty stragihtforward:

-slide the thermal washer onto the threaded interface extending out of the back of the clip-on

-spin the mount itself onto the threaded interface (the mount is threaded on the inside) until it can go no further

-rotate the mount so that the clip-on is properly lined up to the picatinny clamp

-once you are happy with the alignment, use the three nylon tipped set screws (you'll need an allen wrench for that) to lock in the position of the clip-on in the mount.  You need very little torque on the set screws.  They are there for one reason and one reason only: to keep the mount from spinning when you tighten the timing nut in the next step

-spin the timing nut onto the threaded interface of the clip-on to lock the mount in place.  You should not need the timing nut wrench, but one is in there just in case.

Here are the pieces laid out in the order in which you will need them.

When you are done, it should look like this:

Note that the mount normaly comes with two T20 screws.  I am using two thumbscrews instead, since I am popping the mount on and off all the time.  It seems to be staying put with the thumbscrews just fine.  I am hoping Annex will offer the thumbscrews as an option.

It is not quite an equivalent of a QD mount, but we needed something with an extremely low profile clamp to fit under scopes with fairly large objectives.  As is, the mount works with most scope that have objective lens diameter of 50mm or less.

I am using with with Steiner H6Xi 2-12x42 and the two work together exceedingly well.

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