Soliciting Opinions on Vision Enhancement

[SGTGunn]

Hi,

The US currently fields the Raytheon AN/PAS-13 family of thermal weapon sights:

The AN/PAS-13 LTWS for the M16/M4 family
The AN/PAS-13B MTWS for the M240/M249
The AN/PAS-13B HTWS for the M2, MK19, M24 & M82

Total sales for US Army, USMC and SOCOM is 27,000 units or so.

While I'm not 100% sure, I suspect you're normally only going to find these sights mounted on heavier weapons like the M249 and up and only when absolutely mission essential as they are fairly bulky. For rifles and carbines, I believe the AN/PVS-14 + AN/PAQ-4 or AN/PEQ-2 combination (light intensification + IR laser) is far more common.

I don't think we can expect to see thermal sights in common use on every weapon in the US military until they can be reduced in size to something similar to the AN/PVS-14.

Adrian

[pdoktar]

My opinion about the TI infantry costs are that in an assault thery are worth the points as you can use them to spot and suppress enemy infantry in key areas, but generally 1 vs 5 isn´t worth the cost. 1 in 4 could make a difference though. However a sniper with TI could do the suppression trick too, considering it is size 0 and has a marksman rifle, FC and RF. So maybe pure TI-inf without any atgm is too costly at 100 points.

[Suhiir]

I'd tend to agree myself.
I'll be using TI on support weapons (ATGM's, HMG's, FO's) and some top-end recon units but for plain infantry I don't plan to even make it an option.

With a fixed cost of about 80 points, and a fixed range of 40+ for TI it would totally ruin game balance to give it at reduced cost to infantry units (who can't make use of a 40 range anyway).