Aimpoint CS: Revolutionary Battery Life for the Swedish Home Guard

[00:00:03]Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com.

[00:00:06]I'm Ian McCollum and I am here today at Aimpoint headquarters in Malmo, Sweden taking a look at a kind of unique in the US and unusual and sort of unobtainium Aimpoint optic. That is the Aimpoint CS.

[00:00:20]This is a optic that was developed specifically for the Swedish military.

[00:00:25]This was developed in the very early 2000s. The Swedish Army actually kind of remarkably at this point did not have any Aimpoint produced optics. Aimpoint had been making them for the US military for a number of years at this point, but the Swedish Army didn't actually have any. Well, very early 2000s they put out a request for a red dot optic that was intended primarily for use on the AK4, which is the Swedish G3, for use by the Swedish Home Guard.

[00:00:55]And in following with the idea of this being you know, a a home guard sort of weapon, it was the idea was this was going to be kind of left alone and only grabbed in case of need. And so one of the things that the army the Swedish Army specifically required for it was a 10-year constant-on battery life. And that was no mean feat in 2000-2001 when this went into development. In fact, here at Aimpoint they they really didn't like this idea. Like that was a real serious challenge and they had to put in a lot of R&D work to figure out how to accomplish it. Now, they weren't the only company in this trial. There were others there. Trijicon was there back trying to win a contract after losing the M68 US contract to Aimpoint.

[00:01:43]Hensoldt was there and there were a couple other companies I don't recall exactly who off the top of my head, but uh Aimpoint put in the work to develop a new LED technology that would give them 10 years of constant on battery life when coupled with a permanently installed battery. So, let's take a closer look and let me tell you about the other specific requirements that the Swedish Army had for this thing.

[00:02:09]The requirements for what would be adopted as the Aimpoint CS were really pretty substantial. So, it had to be an essentially bomb-proof durable optic able to withstand uh all of the rigors of home guard {slash} reservist {slash} conscript sort of use and abuse. Hence, it has a rubber coating on it as well as a seriously ruggedized construction. Uh the Swedish Army wanted iron sights mounted on it and they specified the exact uh physical geometry of those sights and then provided those specifications to Aimpoint and to the other companies that were competing in the tender. Now, what's interesting here is the sights are made of rubber. That wasn't part of the original specification, but this whole thing had to survive a significant drop test, a 1-m drop test upside down on a fully loaded AK4 or HK G3.

[00:03:08]And when that whole assembly landed on concrete on these uh sights made out of steel, it bent them every single time. Like, the sight design was not capable of withstanding the drop test. So, Aimpoint had the idea to make the sights out of rubber instead. They retain their shape just fine as backup shooting sights, but they're shock-absorbent when drop tested. So, I That's pretty clever and and it worked.

[00:03:36]You will also notice uh Picatinny rail up here on top. One of the other specification requirements was the ability to attach up to 300 g of accessory stuff onto the optic. And that was most likely to be a laser. That was, you know, people were mounting infrared or visible lasers on rifles at the time.

[00:03:57]Uh ultimately, the Swedish Army didn't end up adopting anything to mount on this this bit of rail, but they wanted the option, and so the rail's there on the sight.

[00:04:08]When faced with that challenge of 10 years of constant on uh performance, Aimpoint had two options, or they followed two separate paths. Now, the one that they ended up adopting here was to develop a more efficient LED technology, which they call CET, which by the way, they rolled into all of their other lines of optics, but combined with a larger, permanently fixed battery, and by the way, the battery being fixed in place was another requirement of the Swedish military.

[00:04:38]They did not want soldiers to be able to remove that battery.

[00:04:42]Um instead, opting to send the optics back to Aimpoint, or whatever other company had won the contract, for battery replacement every 10 years.

[00:04:51]Anyway, uh Aimpoint did that by essentially putting a AA battery in this, albeit one that is soldered into place, permanently mounted. It's not exactly a AA, it's actually a 3.7 V battery, um which gives it uh more usable power than a a 1 and 1/2 V AA, but physical dimension-wise, it's essentially a AA battery. And combined with the more efficient CET LED, that gave them 10 years of constant on. Now, that constant on is at what's deemed to be sort of a standard average uh power setting, something that would be, you know, set for normal use, not super bright use.

[00:05:32]One other element to point out here is the elevation adjustment is on the bottom. This looks like it's built into the mount of the scope. It's not. They simply put it on the bottom, put the windage adjustment over here on the side, because there was a requirement for the attachment rail and the iron sights up on top. So, this ended up being the most convenient place for elevation adjustment.

[00:05:55]There is also a kill flash built into it. So, you have a two-part lens cover here. You can lift the whole thing up with these tabs to expose the lens. This is not ideal during the day when it might reflect, but it is ideal at night when you want to use this with night vision and you want maximum light transmission. This does have the same sort of night vision settings and low light, well, night vision compatible lens coating as with what was then being provided to the US military. However, during the day, you just lift up the top cap and you get a nice effective kill flash that prevents the lens from reflecting.

[00:06:35]There was a second path that Aimpoint did investigate in working on this contract, however, and this is one of the 10 prototypes they built of the other option. That other option was actually a pulsed laser diode. So, instead of making a diode more efficient, you could also just turn it on and off really quickly. If you cycle it fast enough, the human eye won't really notice the difference, but you can cut your power use in half if you have a 50% on-off cycle. So, if it's on for a millisecond and off for a millisecond, well, you're actually only powering it half as long and that's one way to extend the battery life. Now, on that prototype, they fixed everything in the main tube. So, this is actually a simpler system because you don't have to have zeroing adjustments inside the tube. Instead, the zeroing adjustments were put kind of like an L-can on the mount itself.

[00:07:32]This didn't end up being the solution that they chose. Among other issues, apparently, when on a machine gun and firing, cuz this was going to be a more general purpose optic intended primarily for the AK4, but also to be used in other places.

[00:07:47]On a machine gun with a regular LED, when you're firing a burst, you end up kind of with a circle as the dot moves around. With the pulsed diode, you got kind of a weird starburst pattern that the army didn't particularly like. So, this didn't end up going into production.

[00:08:06]Aimpoint officially won the contract for the CS in 2002. They started deliveries in 2003, and the sights are actually still in use today. So, the contract required them to, of course, service the optics as required, which means replacing those fixed batteries every 10 years, and they've now done that twice.

[00:08:26]The sights are going on close to 25 years in service now, and they're still out there being used and running effectively. So, it's really cool to get a chance to take a look at these. Uh I think there are a lot of you guys as collectors who are aware of them, have seen them on AK4s and AK5s, but of course, they've never been surplussed by the Swedish military, and so they are really not available in the US.

[00:08:50]Hopefully, you guys enjoyed the video.

[00:08:51]Big thanks to Aimpoint for giving me uh the opportunity to film this and also their cool prototype and show it to you guys. Thanks for watching.