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Yeah, it’s an ACOG clone. Most ACOG clones are Alibaba/Wish crap trying to pose as an ACOG. The Cosmic Tactical Saturn 4×32 has clear ACOG vibes but still stands out with its angular design. Honestly, they have a bit of marketing showing Lara Croft from Tomb Raider from the PS1 era when she was all angles, and it caught my attention. They were willing to send one out for me to test and review alongside their new quick detachable optics mount.
I was drawn to the optic’s angular shape and ACOG-like capability. Like an ACOG, it boasts fiber optics power, has 4X magnification and allows you to easily mount a backup red dot. The shape and size are roughly the same, and I was admittedly curious to see how well a $250 optic performed.
The Saturn 4×32 – Proper Expectations
You know how certain groups of people can be small in nature but seemingly loud enough to convince the world there are tons of them? I call it the Twitter effect. In the gun world, or more specifically, the optics world, two loud voices hold minority opinions.
The first states that everything needs to be professional grade, high-end and expensive. The second voice is the opposite and proclaims everything is just as good even when it’s labeled Feyachi. In reality, most of us are in a middle ground. There is a time and place for every type of optic.
The Cosmic Tactical Saturn 4×32, with its $250 price point, falls into a hobbyist-style optic that can do most of what you need it to do. If you need to do a HAHO jump, underwater insertion or survive a trip up and down the mountains of some forgotten country where we are waging a forever war, then you should spend the $1,000+ on an ACOG.
If you need an optic for the range, hunting, pest elimination or just for fun, Saturn has you covered. When we get into this price tier, we have to accept that it’s not an optic designed to take falls down mountains and be exposed to deep submersion.
The product page doesn’t list any waterproof ratings or operational temperatures. It does list that it was max recoil tested on a .300 Win. Mag.
The Cosmic Tactical Saturn – What’s In The Box
The box the optic comes in is nice. It’s plastic rather than cardboard and has a little foam to protect the optic. Inside the box, we get the optic and manual. It’s ready out of the box to be tossed on a rifle and go. Like the ACOG, it has an illuminated chevron with a bullet drop compensator.
Sadly, the manual doesn’t mention the appropriate velocity the BDC is set to or even the barrel length and ammo type. It does mention the need to zero at 100 yards. I scrounged around the website and found the BDC explained more in-depth. The BDC is tuned for a 62-grain projectile out of a 16-inch barrel. So, M855 and a carbine. It’s the most common ammo with the most common barrel length for ARs in the states.
The Saturn also has a small Picatinny rail mount for attaching a micro red dot as an alternative aiming option. The rail can be swapped for a dedicated RMR plate Cosmic Tactical sells. It comes with a standard bolt mount, but Cosmic Tactical included the quick detach mount with my optic. There is also an optional kill flash available.
To The Range
With the Cosmic Tactical Saturn mounted to a PSA Saber rifle, I hit the ground running. Zeroing took me longer than I’d like to admit. The optic’s initial setting put the weapon way high and right. Enough that I had to get a full-size FBI Q Target and start at 50 yards to get on paper. A few rounds later, I was snapped in enough to trot back to 100 yards and finish the zeroing process.
The turrets provide an audible click most of the time, but sometimes I couldn’t hear it, even with my ear pro removed. Luckily, I could feel the clicks. Each adjustment is .5 MOA. After zeroing, I moved the reticle three inches right, fired a group, returned to zero, and moved left three inches and fired a group.
Upon inspecting the target, I found the left and right groups within 3-inches of the zero group. There is some buffer due to my own abilities and the cheap ammo I’m using. Still, it seems like the adjustments are accurate.
I did realize I need a more appropriate zeroing setup for the new range, but that’s a concern for tomorrow. The Saturn surprised me with its clarity. I didn’t expect much from a fairly inexpensive optic. It delivered a crisp and nice picture. The reticle is also easy to see, and the fiber optics illuminate it well.
Since the sun goes down at 1630 where I live, it’s easy to get some low light shooting in. Even with the sun setting behind me, I could see the white of the FBI Q Target against the sandy white berm at 100 yards.
Blasting Away
I noticed it doesn’t get as bright as an ACOG in bright light. I’ll never need to put duct tape over the fiber optic to reduce the brightness of the reticle. It doesn’t reach those ACOG levels, and when light is mostly gone it doesn’t seem to ignite at all. I shot in the late evening and it had only a glimmer of brightness to it.
This isn’t a big problem. It becomes a bit tougher to use an occluded shooting style when you get up close to the target and try to use the Marine Corps classic 4X at bad breath-distance tactic.
The Saturn has a tight 2.05-inch eye relief. Just like in the old days, I put my nose on the charging handle. This time, I didn’t have to wrestle around an M16A4 length stock to do it. The eye box isn’t super generous, and if you haven’t shot much with prism sights, you might feel underwhelmed. It’s the nature of the beast with these optics.
The field of view is 31.5 feet at 100 yards. That’s fairly small for a 4X prism. The ACOG has a 36.8-foot field of view at 100 yards as a comparison.
I went as far as 200 yards with the Saturn, which is as far as my range allows. Assuming a good-rested position, I could consistently put shots into the chest of the FBI Q Target, with a couple breaking the line at worst. (But I admit, I need to shoot rifles more.)
Tough Enough
Just for fun, I subjected the Saturn to a little beating. I dropped it from chest height onto the ground a few times, leaned the rifle against something and gave it a gentle pushover. I then reloaded and fired a few shots to test the zero. It held on and didn’t fail a few drops.
The Saturn got dirty with its drops and falls, so I needed to wash it. I sprayed it off with the hose from the front, rear and both sides. The fiber optics still fire up, and I don’t see any water penetration. Neither of these tests is particularly brutal, but they show that the Saturn can take a few falls and a light rain.
I like the Saturn for its ACOG-like features without costing over a grand and without it being a cheap piece of crap. However, I think it faces stiff competition from the prism market even at this price point. Primary Arms has an excellent line of proven budget prisms for not much more price-wise. The Swampfox Trihawk costs about the same and is a solid optic. I’m all for more options and hope they succeed, but it’s tough being the new guy in a crowded market. Even so, this optic, and company, deserves a look.
Specifications
Magnification – 4X
Objective Lens – 32MM
Eye Relief – 2.05 in.
Field Of View – 31.5 ft. at 100 Yards
Adjustment Value – 1/2 MOA
Weight – 16.54 ounces
MSRP – $299
Where To Buy
Clarity – *** (And a Half)
The clarity allows you to see out to 200 yards, and in lower light, I could identify targets with ease at 100 yards. It’s surprisingly clear, but I do find the field of view to be a little lacking in its category.
Reticle – ****
They cloned the ACOG reticle, which is a proven performer that’s easy to use and understand. It doesn’t get overcomplicated for a 4X reticle, which is a complaint I often have with other similar price-point options. The one downside is that it doesn’t get ACOG bright.
Ergonomics – ****
Thanks to the auto-adjusting reticle and fiber optics, there are no buttons to press. The optics mount easily and provide backup red dot mounting. The one downside is the weight. This is one hefty optic at 16 ounces and some change.
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“Weight – 16.54 lbs.”
Yikes! (yes its probably a typo, I understand that)
soooo…an ugly heavy bulky thing that might not survive any thing beyond a casual lazy range trip for $300.00.
yeahhhhhh….no.
Pay once for quality.
Still … almost 2x the weight of the Primary Arms slx 5x (which costs $399 I think). That, more than the price, would be a deciding factor for me were I in the market for this type of scope.
I wonder how much the weight delta has to do with the illumination system in particular, versus the general design.
A lot of modern rifles look like you might break something if you grabbed them the wrong way. Like in the dark, in a hurry…
Which ones?
It’s like art, I know them when I see them.
Do they make these things with a longer eye relief, or is a short relief inherent to the prism tech? I like a scout style forward mount for fast acquisition, and if fast acquisition is a main advantage of the prism optic, then a tight relief is contra-indicated. And 2″ is quite right.
Meh at this point cheap ARs and cheap optics like this will take enough abuse and function that it hasn’t been a realistic concern for the better part of a decade so Het rifle is fine, so is optic. With that said vortex probably has a comparable option for less.
*And 2″ is quite right.
TIGHT
Can be but for an AR optic with the way most are trained to shoot barely noticeable especially outside of room clearing. Ultimately if it works for the end user at that price let alone any discounts it will do quite well.
“Do they make these things with a longer eye relief, or is a short relief inherent to the prism tech,”
swampfox has a newer model, released last year, a prism, the Raider, that has a longer eye relief of 3.5 inches (the sight in this article eye relief is 2.5 inches) and a pretty forgiving eye box but its a 1x. I have a raider, haven’t used it much other than try it out with about 200 rounds but it was actually comfortable to use and the eye relief was actually a little more than the specs say and it pretty nice with very clear glass. the only thing that bugged me about it was the one I checked out had a bullet-rise-compensator (BRC) reticle and I would have preferred a BDC reticle with it, but overall its a nice sight.
I think the swampfox raider sells for around $260.00.
I’m actually a fan of this price point type of stuff existing at the *mid point* of quality. It’s Goldilocks for a large subset of people.
It lets a lot of people try out a concept to see if they like it/it works for them/works for their use-case before dropping a grand on it but doesn’t come in so low on quality that it’s going to convince 80% of such people that such a thing is just trash.
As such it creates a nice entry level for people who want to try things out but not end up with a box of expensive stuff they don’t use.
It thereby helps to reduce the elitism the gun community is justly famous for.
Some people simply don’t need to drop the kind of money that high end gear costs and are really, really turned off by the “If you don’t buy a $3000 rifle and then spend $15K on accessories you’re totally gonna die tomorrow, brah. Then we gotta get to work on your pistol, softgoods, medical, training and…” attitude because it comes across as “fuck the poors”.
The fact that a lot of the mid to lower priced optics are showing up on battlefields in use by both sides takes a lot of relevance away from the fixation on high end gear. May not be the best option but holosun/primary arms/vortex have more combat proven track record than one would think.
there are a lot of mid-low priced optics that turn out to be great optics. but when one shows up with a flashy design and overweight with sparse specs for its class at $300.00 ya gotta wonder why so much ‘mass’ and how much testing they actually put into it. excessive mass was an old trick used in some optics to dampen recoil effect on the mechanism that adjusted zero because the mechanism was poor quality and could not stand the recoil stress for long without it being dampened like that.
Cool thing about internet let alone social media is the speed with which such shoddy work gets exposed and distributed. Even low use items like rifle armor get outed as corner cutting (sometimes literally) garbage even with various gag orders in place (beware .04 testing/certified status for recent sales)
Wow, this is so much easier to read not on a phone. Glad I refrained from misplaced comments over the past few months.
.40: I would agree on everything you’ve said.
I simply like decent quality at a lower price point for noobs because they can try out the concept and see if it works for them at all before they upgrade. Weight can be reduced with a future purchase once you know you like the general way that something works.
Buy it, and if you like it, run it into the ground before buying something better. If you don’t like it, you’re not in four digit territory for something you just plain don’t like in general.
From what I’ve read on other forums, it seems like the Ukes, for example, are not impressed with LPVOs, even high-end ones, at least for general issue to riflemen. In the “firearm enthusiast” community we like talk about SHTF, WROL, and so on. Well, those guys are living it.
And when you live in a muddy trench for months, and never know when you might hear incoming mortar rounds and have to throw the rifle to one side to dive into a bunker, the airsoft-grade stuff doesn’t hold up. At all. Cheap red dots die. Airsoft-grade “tactical scopes” die. LPVOs die, even expensive ones. The list of optics that withstand actual SHTF conditions is a short one. Actually the only thing on the list is the ACOG and maybe some of the Aimpoints, and the latter require batteries. Things that require batteries are liabilities when you may have to spend a hundred and twenty straight days at the zero line with unreliable and sporadic resupply. Things that have lenses in general can become a liability when you live in the mud and don’t have a regular supply of things like paper towels, either. After the mortar barrage when you go back outside to pick up your rifle, if the optic’s lenses are covered with mud you spit on them and wipe them with your equally muddy sleeve and hope for the best. At least an ACOG probably won’t break from such treatment, but when you get mud on the iron sights, you shake the rifle until the mud falls off and keep on shooting.
It is sad but true. If you are contemplating an optic for a range toy, or for hunting, that’s one thing. If it’s on a home defense rifle that will sit in the corner for most of its life and never be exposed to the weather, you have more latitude. But if what you are pondering is extended hard use in the field, with mud and trenchfoot and thirty-mile ruck marches and mortars falling around your pillbox, your viable choices are the ACOG or learning to love the carry handle. This is what those guys are telling me. I believe them.
REPORT: The latest on the Madison, WI … .
h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGtiC_LGzoo
also in above video start watching also at 24:26 – why the number of ‘school shootings’ in the GVA and other data-bases used by anti-gun and the media are a lie and how anti-gun and media are lying about it.
How To Enjoy This Christmas If You’re A Trump Hater (Or If You Sadly Know One).
h ttps://thefederalist.com/2024/12/23/how-to-enjoy-this-christmas-if-youre-a-trump-hater-or-if-you-sadly-know-one/
BREAKING: Biden Commutes Sentences of Nearly All Prisoners on Federal Death Row.
h ttps://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/12/23/biden-commutes-sentences-of-nearly-all-on-death-row-n2649461
Consumer grade optics don’t have to look like a stying team from Beretta attacked it with eyeliner and ray gun ethics. First rule of American marketing in firearms is: can you imagine it in the hands of tabbed out operators landing in the courtyard of a Pakistani compound looking for the current #1 terrorist in the world?
Not this one. Eschew the angularity and you not only lose unnecessary ounces but also cut the cost to it’s likely MSRP had it not been hit with Buck Rogers retro. If they can make an $18 monocular or a $5 LED keychain light then this could have been done for $99. Another example of how we are “finessed” into paying far beyond utility value for basic lenses and electronics that sell for dirt cheap in any other form.
Rant off.
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