QBZ-191 service rifle family

TerraN_EmpirE said:

It’s a Diopter rifle sight. It’s fairly common. I have seen AR15 aftermarket BUIS that do the same thing. The sight is designed so that you can gage the elevation of the rifle by using the hole the peep to see the target. Since rifles are a man killer you want to try and put the target in the center of the hole without having a ton of extra space around them. The rifle maker and the sight maker as well as some tuning and trigonometry did the rest. This kind of sight can take any number of variations. This is a disk type. The AR series irons used a set of different leaves that would flip up. HK uses a rotating drum with the holes drilled out at various points in the rotation.

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any reason why PLA go with disk type instead of drum spin ?

drum type is the best because : big drum on the side , spin it with thumb and index to correct your sight like brainless , easy to use , comfortable to use standing , prone , or any position you can think of

disk type feel kind of weird/uncomfortable tbh ... your hand need to place in weird position above you rifle to spin the disk everytime you want to correct the sight

votran said:

any reason why PLA go with disk type instead of drum spin ?

drum type is the best because : big drum on the side , spin it with thumb and index to correct your sight like brainless , easy to use , comfortable to use standing , prone , or any position you can think of

disk type feel kind of weird/uncomfortable tbh ... your hand need to place in weird position above you rifle to spin the disk everytime you want to correct the sight

Click to expand...

You can't flip down a drum.

votran said:

any reason why PLA go with disk type instead of drum spin ?

drum type is the best because : big drum on the side , spin it with thumb and index to correct your sight like brainless , easy to use , comfortable to use standing , prone , or any position you can think of

disk type feel kind of weird/uncomfortable tbh ... your hand need to place in weird position above you rifle to spin the disk everytime you want to correct the sight

Click to expand...

Full disclosure: I have never handled a real HK 416 rifle, only gas airsoft clone. But the rail height argument should be the same.

I am guessing it has something to do with rail height and height over bore. Also there is a good chance that PLA is evolving away from iron sight as primary sighting device.

So if you compare QBZ-03 and QBZ-191, you will notice that 191 has stock that is in-line with the bolt akin to AR-15, whereas 03 is not. As such, the distance between the top of the stock and the top of the upper receiver will be different. Now you might ask, why can HK 416 get away with drum rear sight? If you pay attention to the height of the top rail on HK 416 compared to "normal" AR-15, you will notice that HK 416's top rail is higher. And when you mount sight that was designed for regular AR-15, you will no longer have a good cheek weld (personal experience). Now that is not to say you can't get away with drum rear sight, but since it was designed as an integral part of the rifle, there would have to be a rear sight tower in order to actually make it usable, and that would be a snag risk. Hell, some people advocate not mounting any BUIS in the first place because of the snag risk.

Also, QBZ-95 and QBZ-03 was designed before the advent of Pic rails and quick detach optics, and so iron sight was designed as the primary sighting device and optic-mounting was more of an afterthought, whereas QBZ-191 is clearly designed with mounting optics in mind. Notice that a lot of the features present on 95 are missing in 191 (e.g. night sight). In other words, the iron sight on 191 was designed to stay out of the way unless needed, and was not meant to be used as the primary means of aiming.