The Bat-signal has been seen! To the rescue!

Ok, so what I'm going to do is go home tonight and mount up my 2.5x on my SBR which has an A2 fsb, and I'll take a pic through the scope so you can judge for yourself. I think Lightstriker is right, you'll be able to see a bit of fuzzy FSB at the bottom of the field of view. Some people can't stand it, others don't even notice it when they are actually shooting the gun and focusing on the targets.

I'll tell you one application where I wasn't able to get over the front sight base, I tried putting one of our 1-6x scopes in a regular height mount on a "Dissipator" AR build (I sold that one earlier this year). With the scope at 1x and a fixed FSB way out there at rifle length, I got to see the entire FSB all the way down to the handguards in perfect focus. OMG it was horribly distracting... I just couldn't get over it. I would have to use a higher mount or something, but in practice both of my rifles with low power variables don't have the fixed front sight block anyway.

So, stand by for a better answer and photo tomorrow!

@Austin1911, obviously I own one of these and I've used it for a couple of years. I think it's the best $199 scope on the market and probably the most underrated scope PA makes. It's the entry-level, "gee whiz I'm not sure a prism scope is for me but I want to try one" scope. Don't be fooled by the one year warranty, they are tough as hell. The low warranty is to drive folks who are on the fence to the 3x scope, which costs more and has a lifetime warranty. Personally I prefer the "eyebox" and field of view on the 2.5x vs. the 3x. The field of view is great, the scope is super fast, it's a great do-it-all scope from 25 feet to about 200 yards.

That being said, you'll see in the reticle that we have bullet drop compensation out to 600 yards or something like that. Unless you have Superman's eyes, forget it. If you want to get good hits at 600 yards, a 2.5x scope is not the right tool for that job. Not even a $1000 Trijicon ACOG 2.5x is the right tool for that job. My personal philosophy is, I want 1x magnification for each 100 yards of engagement range, at a minimum, and more magnification than that as I get to extreme long range. So a red dot, I'm good for 100 yards. A 2.5x scope, good for 250 yards, on a standard steel torso or paper target. When I get out to 800 yards or so, I want even more magnification, give me a 14x or even an 18x. I could use the 600 yard BDC in the 2.5x prism scope to hit a target at 600 yards, if my target was, you know, an enemy troop transport truck or something. LOL

Post here if you have any questions, I know this scope inside and out and I'm happy to answer.

@Austin1911, it was dark by the time I got home last night, so welcome to my garage. I just moved, so you can see a bunch of stuff lying where the Vette should be like some of my holster making machinery (I'm one of those guys who is so picky about holsters I wound up bending my own kydex).

As promised, here's "Zelda", my SBR, with the PAC2.5X in position and the stock extended to the right spot for me to get a fast sight picture. Please note, a question we get a lot, even a bulky flip up rear sight like the Troy unit fits easily underneath.



Here's the view with the illumination off. I didn't really get the reticle sharp, I took these with my iPhone so the best solution was just to focus it on the Corvette logo on the garage door. Distance is probably 10-15feet, so whatever, we can call this a CQB situation. Also, the cell phone camera sucks at capturing the entire field of view. All that black you see around the field of view isn't there with the naked eye, there's a minimal amount of black bordering going on. I think you can see how the 2.5x magnification doesn't really throw most of us off that much up close when shooting with both eyes open. You have a great field of view through the scope and plenty of peripheral vision all around.



And here's a view with illumination set on medium, maybe setting 5? Again the reticle isn't sharp here, but you can still get a sense of it. You can see the FSB is definitely there, but it doesn't reach up all the way to any of the reticle features, you'll still be able to use the entire BDC for example, without the FSB getting in the way. I asked my girlfriend if the FSB bothered her and she said "Oh wow, I didn't even notice it until you mentioned it, wow!" Some other guys will find the same sight picture totally intolerable. It all depends on your expectations I think.

Yeah, the diagram is, if anything, a bit oversimplified. 50/200 is correct but then people would ask for a 300 yard BDC mark, which is just below the dot and would be really super difficult to present in a usable way at just 2.5x magnification. So what we really meant there is that the center dot is more like a maximum point blank range setup, whereby you can hold dead on out to 300 yards or so and you'll only hit a few inches low at worst, like a 3 inch drop below the bottom of the center dot (which is a tiny little 1 MOA dot). The rest of the reticle calculates out as shown in the diagram, pretty much dead on, although with my particular virtual 16" M4 setup in Strelok Pro it always shows me hitting just a tad bit low at 600 yards too (not that I'm ever going to take a 600 yard shot with it, as I mentioned above).

When we went to the 3x prism scopes, Dimitri was able to switch out the dot for a chevron setup with the 7.62x39 version, and we use the features of the chevron itself to give folks a more precise idea of an intermediate distance between zero and 300. But this is 7.62x39 which flies slower and has much more curve to its trajectory than 5.56 does. And you can see just how close it is, even so.



Out to 300 yards or so, 5.56 just doesn't drop enough to mess with another BDC mark, at least in a 2.5x magnification setup. Once we get to 6x or 8x in the low power variable scopes, that changes.