Magpul MOE handguard

[Army Chief]

Train with what you're going to use.

Sound advice to be sure.

I guess the part I left out is that I'm in something of a transition; after 26 years in uniform, I'm finally in a position where my needs/wants/desires no longer need to be driven by operational requirements. In exploring what might be the best fit for me personally, without respect for team compatibility or external standarization, I'm admittedly branching out a bit. As a LH rifleman who has always altered my manipulations to suit the weapon, I'm now interested in altering a weapon to suit my manipulations. That was at least partly what drove me to invest in the MOE, as the MPLA offers a host of new possibilities.

To get back on topic, I've spent most of my career as an iron sights guy, and while I have some experience with Aimpoints, the only glass I use on a regular basis is a S&B Zenith Flash Dot (1.5-6x42mm) on my hunting carbine. I'm a very young 43, but 43 nonetheless, so I'm beginning to appreciate some magnification for general range work as presbyopia begins to set in. For close-in work, obviously that can work against you, so I wouldn't hesitate to go with a Short Dot if I thought it offered the best compromise. Trijicon has me rethinking that just a bit with the TR-24 release, and I had some earlier interest in the Nightforce NXS -- though the latter didn't offer much in the way of daylight-visible illumination. I'm looking for variable versatility, as opposed to a 1:1 RDS -- and am willing to pay for the right product -- but I'm just not settled on what that might be. (ACOGs definitely appeal to me as well, but at what cost for close-in work? I don't really want the compexity of a Docter riding shotgun.)

Now we've ventured pretty far afield from discussing MOE handguards, so this might be a better conversation for an altogether new post; that said, whatever I end up doing optics-wise, I think the ability to add short rail sections to the MOE will really eliminate the need to retrofit a rail. A light, and maybe a short VFG will more than suffice for my purposes.

NOTE: I've transplanted the optics part of this conversation as a new post, so please limit follow-on discussion here to the topic of MOE handguards, so as to maintain the integrity of the thread. Thanks!

AC