@karl_h - good to know. I have a friend with a Riton who has had nothing but good to say about it and I have looked through it myself, so not a complete "wing it" on the purchase. His is on his PCP which will also be on mine, so hopefully there will be no "shock" to the scope that seems to befalling the PBs in your research.
I have been looking at the "higher magnification" scopes for FT and HFT and the price has always been the downfall! At 1/2 off I'm hoping I will get a winner.
To be completely fair, a number of people using them on their precision 22lr seemed to be happy, saw one return in that crowd but it was bad out of the box(parallax on that one couldn't be adjusted past 100, knob would turn, just nothing happened after 100 yards). That one person had a new one in hand in a weeks time and seemed happy with it. Should have phrased the good optics for the price differently, mostly it was very good+ optics for the price, not just good.
It's kind of hard reading posts with that crowd, you have people that just enjoy the long range aspect, and may even compete at a low level but would never sink a boat load of money in it, it is only fun for them. And then the other half of the crowd has to sh&t all over it because they are not using ZCO, March, or NX8 if you are poor. Believe me, a lot of them literally tell them to give up and do something else if they are that poor, and it's not tongue in cheek. I know there is some talk with thermal's here, not long ago someone had posted up their collection of thermals on one of those boards. There were about 9 of them in the group picture, well over 300k in that picture. Had one that people thought none existed in the wild(private ownership), military contract price on that one alone was way way north of 100k, no telling who he knew to legally get one and what it cost. And you better bet it was legally owned, nobody is that stupid to post a picture of one they somehow got illegally, alphabet guys would be busting down the doors at 2am and killing your pets.
if it were me, I wouldn't take a chance, just get a vortex pst, same price range and proven reliable/tough decent optics for the price. BTW, whenever I say decent optics for the price, I'm saying it's horrible. I'm spoiled with all the glass on my serious hunting rifles, anything less is garbage. So I use garbage optically but solid mechanically on all my toys that aren't used for serious hunting, which includes all my pcp's.
