At the Crimson Trace booth we found a couple brand new releases, the HRO and the RIG.
Designed for machine guns, heavy-recoiling calibers, and really rough use in general, the new Heavy Recoil Optic offers a large field of view and a sealed, extra rugged red dot housing.
“Street price” will be around $400. The glass looked great and it’s always nice to have an optic that will stand up to truly heavy use. Crimson Trace told me about some of the torture testing they were doing on the HRO and it was pretty intense. The ammo cost alone would have bankrupted me many times over.
The new CT RIG is an angled forward grip for M-LOK and Picatinny rails with a brightness-adjustable, 500 lumen max flashlight up front.
On/off and brightness adjustment buttons are located in intuitive spots.
On the left side, the rechargeable batter pack clicks in and out of the RIG and a standard micro USB charger will plug right into it.
Each RIG comes with two batteries so you can always have a fully-charged one in the RIG.
Nice. I have a RIG en route for testing and we’ll follow up with a full review in the near future.
The question I ask about optics durability is this: “Will it withstand a spring-piston air gun’s recoil?”
The back-and-forth recoil impulse from spring-piston air guns can shake many otherwise quality scopes into misadjustment and non-repeatability.
Scopes in general are not meant to be interchangeable with different types of arms. Airgun optics are built differently than firearm optics, and shotgun optics are built differently than rifle optics. Because it isn’t just the overall strength of the recoil impulse that matters, but also the vector of that impulse.
To use an automechanics example, car engine camshafts are designed to resist extreme rotational stresses, but have near-zero resistance to lateral stresses. They’ll break into pieces from just being dropped on the floor.
can confirm: the lowly trs- 25 lasts for years of heavy use on the rws48 diana .22cal, and .177 and the 460 in .177.
somewhere a chipgopher just shuddered in hibernation.
How come the HRO is not on the CT web site? All I see on the CT web site is the CT Rad series for sights. Need more info on the HRO like specs, battery life and type, if motion activated, weight, dimensions etc…
OK, in one pic it shows it has the CT Motion Sensor thing… still need more info though like I said. Interested, but I don’t like this thing of teasing products as new for the year then no disclosing specs for them.
Seems to be an increasingly common problem with SHOT show announcements. Not one I’ve seen so far this year actually exists, and few things even have a product page on the Mfg website.
SHOT has really turned into a “hey we’re thinking about releasing something NEXT year….. wanna see?”
I’ve killed a Vortex UH-1 on my .460 revolver. I’d be willing to try the HRO.