Housings are machined in hong kong, LED, circuitry, etc. from Tokyo, and final assembly in Columbus.

Edit: Please disregard the downvotes. Some losers are botting us to stifle our voice.

I will never take a nap ever again. Lol

Okay time to peel back some onion layers:

I first submitted elementary drawings to the optic house in HK in mid 2020. Covid helped us get their attention with slower business in china, so we could leverage our (at the time) small ME team with their existing OE team. We went back and forth on architecture for a while; frankly we weren't the best clients as we were slow to work up the funds, but they still humored us over the course of 18 months or so, and got serious with us in early 2022. The deal we struck up was as follows:

They'd help us with design for free, and in exchange, we have to use them for all machined or molded components. This includes housings, molded components like buttons, windage & elevation drums, QD mounts, etc. In exchange, they'd give us trade contacts for emitter and glass manufacturers in Japan. This is why we have a smorgasbord of sourcing (for now) on both LP-1 and Pandora. This is also why you will probably see lookalike Pandoras eventually; more on that later.

So, I didn't have to pay an optical engineering facility $30K+ to help our ME team meet design parameters, and they made a premium on each component that they sourced for us.

During the various generational updates, this optics house farmed out our (and, of course their) legacy designs as "neutral" offerings. This is quite common overseas, especially if you rely on their technical input. We are regularly solicited by optics houses in china offering similar protocols. I am certain this won't be the last LP-1 looking optic you see.

You effectively receive a fast food menu with "blank" designs and you can engrave your logo or surface model the basic exterior aesthetics for free. Out of curiosity, I replied to the most recent one. We were quoted $54/unit for an ACRO P2 clone, one that looks identical to many of the chinese manufactured P2 clones out there. Erector tube, CR2032, etc.

I presume 3E reached out to the optic house we used for a basic red dot, and they innocuously received the legacy drawings they assumed we had forgone in between contact. 6061 housing, CR2 battery, etc. It's nearly identical to "our" Gen 1, which had the worst QD mount ever haha.

We've obviously made significant departures from our initial drawings, the majority of which have been shared on r/LeadAndSteel (including the Pandora's generational changes). If I had to guess, they didn't want to be associated with the same accusations, so the gen 2 was a healthy departure with their own feature set. It looks way cooler than my optic, that's for sure.

Such is the name of the game when it comes to firing off drawings overseas. There is zero IP protection, because there's not much that's novel. I've never publicly admitted this, but much of our internal architecture was borrowed from the LCO. So truthfully, I don't have much of a leg to stand on regarding "my design my right." I can only offer the market our product, our material selection, our feature set, and hope people like it. There is absolutely nothing that is eligible for a utility patent, save for potentially* aurawake. And with how similar all the big window red dots are, the LP-1 will never not be a "cheap knockoff" to some.

I presume the optics game will look closer and closer to the AR15 game as time goes on. But to assuage any concerns, we'll have a few social media posts over the next few weeks highlighting our engineering steps (and pitfalls) of our designs. I would hope that they're referred to like our previous disclosures on the subreddit as proof of us making things better as time goes on and feedback is piled in. We're not homework stealers, and neither is 3E. Hell, I'm certain they're more capable than we are.

And as an aside, our Elcan competitor does not seem identical in spec nor function to the 3E model, but I should probably procure one just in case. Kinda talking out of my ass, but at first glance, our pechan adjustment lever is in a completely different location, our current optic body is dissimilar, and our secondary optic mounting location and plate system isn't the same either. We also have an adjustable diopter, and the same QD system from the LP-1 for tooling conservation as we transition to fully US made LP-1s. It's currently closer to the Spectre 1-4X, but that's subject to change. We're also not using that factory to begin with; everything is being worked on in close collaboration with our partnered optical engineering facility in Florida.

Longest winded reply ever, but I hope that makes sense.

TL;DR The LP-1 is our red dot as much as the ARC is our AR-15, but with a few more proprieties.

Meh.

I stated why his bribery accusations were fucked up, and that criticism of the LP-1 was not the topic of discussion.

He's trying to make it seem like I'm suing him over a negative product review, when the careless accusations are the subject of the C&D. It's disingenuous, and twisting my words through videoediting is all I needed to see lol.

I like the Halo music though.