I'm Sure This Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Hey guys, Hop here. Thank you for tuning into the channel. There's a question that I see that comes up every couple of years like clockwork, usually from guys who are new to the hobby, when they see a rifle like this that is frankly festooned with electronics. We have got an illuminated LPVO, a piggyback red dot, a laser module, and a weapon light, each one with their own individual batteries, and I think we've got two CR123 devices, one CR2032, and a 1632. So there are four battery-powered devices on this rifle, running off of three different types of batteries. So if you're in a problem-solving mood, you might say, there's got to be a better way to accomplish this. Is there some way that we could run a couple of these devices, or maybe all of them, off of one common power source? And historically, there have been a couple attempts to integrate that into the rifle, and there's also been many attempts to consolidate two or more devices into a single device. We recently did a video about quad-function laser modules, which are an attempt to consolidate the light and the laser into one common device, running off a single battery. One of my favorite historical attempts to solve this problem is the Burris TM-PR series. This is one of the devices we're going to be talking about today. This is a prism optic with a power-sharing system for up to three modular accessories. Did it work? No. It only lasted for a couple of years, and they didn't actually build this out into a complete system before it got discontinued, for what you'll see are some pretty obvious reasons. We're going to talk about this one today, and a couple of other weird stabs at consolidating every single electronic enabler on your gun into one single unit. Stick around. Today's video was made possible by our channel sponsor, Venture Surplus. A lot of what I talk about on this channel is old and terrible, but the cool thing about Military Surplus is that it's old and not terrible. The only reason they get rid of it is because they have to spend their entire budget every year, or they don't get more money the next year, so I guess they might as well. Thankfully, some of that wasted tax revenue comes back to you in the form of government surplus, and Venture Surplus has a huge selection of U.S. Military Surplus gear, camouflage clothing, cold and wet weather layering clothing, outdoor gear, and even MREs. Check them out at the link in the video description and use the code provided to save 10% off your order. A big thank you to Venture Surplus for their continued support of this show. Thank you guys for watching. Let's get back to the video. So, the Burris TM-PR series. This was supposed to be an ecosystem that consisted of prism optics with a large capacity CR123 battery, and then three modular attachment points you could add accessories on that would just share the power with the base optic. The appeal of that, I think, should be pretty obvious to almost anybody. Same reason that you've got a, you know, a camera on your phone. This AR has four electronic devices on it using four distinct batteries in three different styles. So, if I want to be able to supply backup batteries for everything on that rifle, well, then I'm going to need to have at least three batteries, or I can say, okay, the illumination of the LPVO is admission critical. The piggyback red dot is kind of an auxiliary sighting system, so I carry a couple of CR123s to keep my laser and my light going, and that's probably good enough. But, any tech nerd is going to be well-versed in creating solutions in search of a problem. So, that's where you get stuff like this. There is a problem that you run into immediately with this concept, and that is, what do you actually put on here? This is too far back on the gun for a weapon light. You can attach a laser to it, but why would you need that? Also, it's too far back on the gun. Also, it's hard to activate. Also, it's a civilian legal laser, so it's not actually powerful enough to be useful for anything. So, really, what you're able to do is piggyback a red dot and have the red dot share the power source of the prism optic. That, I think, would have been probably enough to make this an interesting, standout product, and the kind of thing that I think has some potential. Other companies could look into it. Mostly, I think the TMPR probably failed because the optic itself is not amazing, and the ability to piggyback mount a red dot was, at the time when this was introduced, just starting to become popular, but not nearly as overwhelmingly popular as it is today, and then the other accessories to support this thing never really materialized. This is as close to a complete package as I can put together. We have got the base prism optic. This is a 5x prism. It was also available as a 3x prism, and they're basically the same as their AR332 and AR532 prism optics. Probably the same glass, slightly different design, you know, QD instead of cross bolts on the base, but it's basically the same prism that Burris was already making. Except, they have gone with a push-button control system, and they've added these three removable plates that have electronic contacts that interface with the piggyback accessories. What could you put on there? Well, you could get the Fast Fire III. Burris was really one of the main first companies that was doing a whole lot with mini or micro red dots pistol mounted piggyback. The Fast Fire series was pretty much designed around, you know, pistol and piggyback mounting. They also really embraced the concept of piggyback because their prisms had picatinny rail slots on the top. They also made the pepper mount, which is a, you know, almost everybody makes something like that now, where one of the ring caps for your scope mount can be replaced with a red dot mount ring cap. So yeah, Burris was kind of ahead of the curve, I would say, on the Fast Fire and piggyback red dots. This is not the real TMPR Fast Fire. There was a special version of the Fast Fire III called the M3, I believe, which had the contacts in the bottom for power sharing. This one is just a regular Fast Fire III, so it's got its own second battery. So I have cheated a little bit. I could not for the life of me find the real deal Fast Fire M3. I also found these battery adapter or expander plates for what I believe is for the M3 specifically, which would give it the ability to also have a CR2032 or other coin cell battery to extend the life of it. I believe that's what those were for. Kind of perhaps an admission that the battery life that you get from running all this ---- off of one CR123 is not going to be quite enough. Again, the only other accessory that I know of that was actually produced for the TMPR system is the Viz laser module. This is a red laser that you can zero independently. I guess you could co-align it with a day optic and you can activate it with this little button on the side. Do I even have to explain why this is a terrible idea? This was common though. For some reason, in the late 2010s, people really wanted to put lasers on red dots. There is a version of the Holosun... I wanted to say it's the 403. It's in Tarkov that has a laser built into it. There is the Redfield Counterstrike, which I picked up one of after Brassvax and I saw it in an advertisement in an old gun magazine. Laser built into the mount of the red dot. I'm not sure why people were doing that because they're just straight up unusable. For starters, activating them basically doesn't work. You don't have a remote switch capability, so you have to reach up and hit the button on the optic, meaning that I guess in any situation that you intended to use this laser, you would have to just turn it on and just be shining it around, letting people know where you were. That is if anybody, including you, could see it because these are five milliwatt civilian legal lasers, meaning that in any daytime situation, they're just completely invisible. So yeah, I guess it's for CQB. I put this 5x prism on my home defense gun and then I'm like, damn, that's unusable indoors. Thank God I've got this slaved Viz laser that I can use instead if the piggyback red dot is for some reason not enough. The Fastfire III was a good red dot for its time and it still holds up pretty well. These things are not going to be as durable as a modern red dot design. They don't have the battery life and all that stuff. But yeah, the Fastfire III is pretty good and I actually do kind of like having a Fastfire III mounted onto one of the older Burris AR332 prisms. The 532, the 5x prisms, I've never met a 5x prism that I liked. Same problem that I've had with the Primary Arms 5x micro and their older 5x macro. It's just a really, really tough eye box. Not very good eye relief. I don't really like the 5x prisms. I would have preferred to find the TMPR III if I was actually ever going to use this for anything, which of course I'm not. It's a useless vintage scope. But I know the 3x version would be better because I've used the AR332 prism and it is a lot better than this 5x. For a budget prism, it's not awful. They do have a pretty good reticle. It's the same one that they used in some of their MTAC scopes as well as the RT6. It's a nice ballistic horseshoe reticle. Illumination is actually surprisingly good on this, better than it was on their older prism and on their RT6 series scopes. One thing that I always say is a giveaway for a garbage Mall Ninja scope is when it has two illumination colors. If it's got red and green illumination, then you know it's just Mall Ninja trash, with the possible exception of the Trijicon Credo or Acupower 1-8, which I think has dual color illumination. Weird feature. This one goes even further beyond because this is a tricolor illumination scope. You get red, green, and blue illumination. I don't know, maybe that circles back around to being kind of cool. I think it's possible that Burris themselves had fairly low confidence in this design because of the aforementioned Fastfire M3 battery expansion pack that you could buy for it, which would allow you to mount it onto a normal pick riser, a normal Fastfire-compatible pick riser, and use it like a normal Fastfire 3 in the event that TMPR didn't pan out. And also, you may notice that this laser module has its own little battery door and can accept some little button cells as well. It doesn't need them if it's going to be running off of the prism site, but it's a capability and it included a little pick riser, so you could actually mount it on the front of a rifle, I guess, and then you could actually hit that button with your thumb and make it a substantially more useful product than it is when it's stuck back here on a prism optic. So has anybody else done something quite so insane as the Burris TMPR? Well, yeah, in a sense. One device that I would like to point out, which I originally wanted to cover in my video about quad-function laser devices, is the older Holosun LS420 and LE420 series lasers. Those were quad-function laser modules, so you've got your visible laser, IR laser, IR illuminator, but you also have a white light illuminator on the same device, similar to the Iris 4, which is one of the best laser modules you can get right now. The older LS420 and LE420 had a cool feature that you can't get on the Iris 4, which is that you could piggyback mount a red dot directly to the laser body with a plate that was included with the laser. So you basically have a little plate, you can mount a T2 compatible or T1 compatible optic to it, like basically all of the old Holosun series tube red dots, and you could end up with, I guess, a five-function unit, where it's not just all four of your low-light enablers, but it's also your regular aiming optic. The big obvious shortcoming of this concept is that, again, it's not particularly usable. You have to decide where you're going to mount this thing. If you mount it back on the receiver of an AR, for example, then how are you going to activate it? You're going to have to snake a cable running all the way to the handguard so that you can actually access the device from a firing grip. And if you do that, you've got four illuminators with a pretty wide spill that are really far back and pretty low down on the rifle. So most likely, you're going to illuminate a whole bunch of your rifle and your hand. You're probably going to block the lasers, depending on how you grip the gun. That's not particularly usable. So really, the only niche application for this kind of thing would be on an incredibly short gun, maybe even with a riser. That's causing problems of its own because the Red Dot already sits pretty damn high in one of those setups. So it's a cool idea. I'm sure there are some applications where it could actually find a home, but it's just so limited in actual usability. The ergonomics of it are a complete ******* disaster. But Holosun was not the first company to take a stab at that general concept. We've also got the EOTech EOLAD series, which is a collaboration between EOTech and Steiner, formerly Laser Devices, which was basically a concept to integrate a laser module into the side shroud of an EOTech holographic sight, giving you, again, your aiming solution, as well as your entire complement of IR lasers and maybe Viz lasers as well, in one unit. No white light, that's okay. Back down to four functions, I guess. The EOLAD has the same problems as all of these other things. The emitters are way too far back on the gun, and they sit too low, meaning that when you actually grip the rifle and press a button to activate it, you're illuminating your own hand. Also, there's a real lack of convenience. One thing that would make this concept a whole lot better is if everything was co-aligned, meaning that you could zero the optic and have the lasers zeroed alongside it, as opposed to having two sets of turrets that you have to manage, two separate parts of the optic body that can shift in different ways. So it's basically just a completely terrible idea, right? Well, not exactly. There is one last interpretation of this concept that actually seems to work pretty well, and that is the Wilcox BOSS-XE. This is like the EOLAD, done in a more competent fashion. The BOSS-XE is a red dot that has an onboard laser aiming module. So you've got the IR designator, the Viz laser, and the IR illuminator. The big difference is that the BOSS-XE is really designed from the ground up as one inclusive unit. So all of these emitters are co-aligned or slaved together, so that when you zero your red dot, you've also zeroed your lasers. That's all moving together on one optical bench, I guess you could say. The BOSS-XE is probably most at home on extremely short guns, probably with a riser as well, so that you can eliminate some of the splash effect of having your illuminators set so far back on the gun. If you want to try it out for yourself, but you can't afford the $4,000-ish price tag on a BOSS-XE, it is implemented extremely well in Escape from Tarkov, so have fun with that. So that's it, that's the Burris TMP-R. Seems like a good idea if you don't think about it for more than about five seconds. Nobody has ever done this particularly well, and when they did, it turns out it cost a huge amount of money to get it right. So if you're looking at the stack of electronics attached to most people's tactical carbines these days and thinking there's got to be a better way to consolidate these down, it has been tried. Not successfully. You could be the first one to do it. There was a military project back in the day to create an electrified rail system. I say back in the day, probably was only a handful of years ago. To create an electrified rail system so that attachments could just be put anywhere on the gun and immediately draw power from the rail, the handguard, the receiver, wherever it was going to be. There are a lot of practical reasons why that's kind of a pipe dream, mainly that it's difficult to ruggedize that much electronic stuff. Contacts exposed to the air on the rail will probably have an oxidization problem, making them lose contact unless you keep them clean. You're also then, essentially, you're spending a whole lot of money by creating an entire power sharing system and then only using little tiny bits of it. The rest of it's all going to waste, so it's probably actually more economical to just go ahead and put a battery in every individual component of your rifle setup. Anyway, this one was incredibly rambly and insane, but I feel like I had a good time doing it anyway. Burris TMPR. Took a while to track down the pieces of it that I could find, and I just thought it was fascinating because, yeah, I mean, not even that long ago, people were just trying ----, man. Red dots used to be weird. Optics used to be pretty bad. I guess people just didn't know better. The standard of experience with all these things was quite a lot lower. That's all we got for today. Thank you guys very much for watching. If you'd like to support the show, check out the links in the video description. If you support me on Subscribestar, you get access to a whole bunch of bonus stuff. There's a Discord, which sort of works. We're trying to fix it. We're not trying anymore. We tried and it didn't work, so yeah, I know it's broken and we're fine with it. Anyway, I'll see you guys next time. Bye.