Oh hai guys, what's going on in here?

Got a couple of things I want to add, maybe clear up a couple of things. I'm posting this as an employee of PA so you bet I'm super biased here. But I also own and use these products myself, regularly, so I'm not just some schmuck who never shoots and is just going by a spec sheet on his desk. I'm a schmuck who shoots every week!

Ok, so the first thing I want to clear up is, MD-RB-AD is not made by Holosun. And I know where they are made, and we won't say. We have to try to stay a step ahead of the competition here. It is well known that MD-ADS is made by Holosun and we are not discontinuing that optic, it's a quality optic and it's given great service to tons of users including me, so our relationship with Holosun remains quite good. We also offer our co-branded model which is the ACSS reticle in a Holosun micro dot, and that thing is super cool.

Secondly, for the folks who don't want to buy anything with "Made in China" on the side, I get that, I really do, and we have dreams to build optics here in the USA one day. However, if you think your favorite scope company makes their scopes in the USA, I encourage you to do some deep research on that. You simply cannot get glass that is made here. Other companies import entire assemblies from overseas, then put the turrets on here in the states, install the illumination battery, nitrogen purge the unit, and put "Made in the USA" on their website because to their interpretation of the regulations there's no distinction between Made in the USA and Assembled in the USA.

Side note, if any of you are billionaire entrepreneurs, please get the EPA to allow you to start a high quality optical glass factory here in the states. Please.

Thirdly, if you haven't looked through a Chinese made scope in a few years and you just swore them off as cheap crap back in 2012 or something, give them another look. Glass quality is way better than it was even five years ago, and we have the iPhone to thank for that. Remember how ten years ago there was a huge market for small point and shoot digital cameras? Each one with an annoyingly slightly different battery and memory stick and nothing standardized? Cell phone cameras got so good that everyone stopped buying those little digital cameras and just started using their phones instead. The companies that were making the glass to go into those cameras had to adapt or die when the small camera market vanished overnight, and some of them converted over for binoculars, laser range finders, rifle scopes, red dots, etc. If you look though a Chinese scope from ten years ago you're looking through lowest-bidder glass made on ancient machines. If you look through a Chinese scope from last month, you're looking through glass made on newer machines that were designed to hold the calibrations of camera glass. It's a huge difference.

The long term implications of globalization are fascinating and terrifying. A 5 axis CNC machine doesn't care if it's plugged into a wall in Hartford Connecticut by a union employee paying 36% of his income in taxes, or plugged into a wall in Xi'an, China (one of the most polluted places on earth, do a google image search). The CNC machine will perform the exact same operations when you flip the switch to "on" and hit Enter on the keyboard. Once you realize what that truly means, it'll keep you awake at night.

BiggerHammer:

Officially, I cannot and will not make a political statement of any kind on behalf of Primary Arms. I will make the statement that we have been looking HARD at how to make a red dot sight here in the USA for some time now, and the obstacles are daunting indeed.

Speaking only as an individual person, I think it would be much easier for things to be made here if the government didn't suck away a third of our income before we ever saw it. If family health insurance didn't cost half of what people bring home each month. If government didn't preemptively choke the life out of every new business venture. If half the voters in this country didn't see businesses as the capitalist enemy.

Raising a tariff on imported goods is like putting a Spider-Man bandaid on a sucking chest wound. Mostly it's theater so you feel like you "did something", but it doesn't address the root problems at all, and it doesn't change the long term outcome even a little.

Infidel4Life:

We just sold out of them but the MD-RB-AD is a big step up from our previous microdots. It's more of a step up than we can easily describe in a glib little product description on our website. We have more on the way and I'll be buying more for my own use when they get here.

Yeah, it really is. Some of the changes that I can talk about but aren't necessarily in the product description:

1. Fully potted emitter. Way better for shockproofing, the emitter and all associated electronics are encased in an epoxy which absorbs g forces that would have been transferred to those pieces before.

2. Fully supported erector assembly. In the past the erector assembly went into the optic from the rear and was sort of glued into place at the front. MD-RB-AD has a cut out section at the front where front of the erector goes (think of an eyeball going into a socket), and the same torque ring that torques down the objective lens also torques down the front of the erector (now imagine a second eye socket going around the FRONT of the eye and holding everything together with a good amount of torque).

3. Improved waterproofing. For example, the turret caps are aluminum now instead of plastic in the MD-ADS. You can flip them over and use them to adjust windage and elevation. They screw all the way down to metal-to-metal contact with the scope body, with the waterproofing O-ring inside, instead of screwing down on top of the O-ring and relying on compression of the O-ring by a plastic piece to keep water out. A small detail, but one of many.

4. Stainless steel adjustment internals. No more brass guts inside to get rounded off over time and turn your clicks into mush. A lot of people have noted that the clicks on on this scope feel better, but they don't really know why. Should be WAY better in the long term.

I'm not aware of any plans to put ACSS in this one, but it does seem like a pretty obvious move to me.

okay, now make a 1.5x Acog clone for me with astigmatism

It's a 1x prism and it's really really good for the money. We'll show it off at SHOT in another month. If you want the 1.5x just pony up for the co-branded TA-44, it's amazeballs.

Forgot to say: battery powered acog clone, no fiber optic, for control of intensity