Note: Speaking about real firearms (and only shooting paper targets) here:
Personally, I think a good, old fashioned set of open iron sights is better than anything else -- especially scopes. I suppose scopes have their places (extremely long range, and all that), but for 100 yards and less I prefer iron sights.
I do like red dot sights, though. I used to have trouble seeing the crosshairs in a scope (especially ones with large magnification). A red dot, with no magnification is basically just a laser pointer...except, one that you can see much better, and the "enemy" can't see it. I find that it is much faster and easier to acquire a target with a red dot than with a scope, and slightly faster than with iron sights. '
Did you know that...you can actually use a red dot sight with both eyes open? Yep, you can...although your accuracy may decrease somewhat.
The bad thing about red dots is that they require a battery. Also, in bright and/or bad-angled light, you have to turn the brightness up. That not only drains your battery faster (though it should still last a few hours, at least), but increases the size of the dot...which in turn tends to decrease accuracy.
As far as using red dots in Nerf:
Well, it's not as silly as using a scope, that's for sure. As long as it isn't one that also magnifies the image (I'm not even sure they make those...), the red dot sight is basically just a fancy aperture sight. I've never nerfed in a large scale war, so I can't say whether or not a red dot would be practical. I will say that, whenever I'm using a blaster, I tend to feel like I need some sort of sight, but that may just because I'm used to that sort of thing.
I actually bought a cheap ($7) red dot sight at Dunham's to put on my longshot. It felt cool, but I never even got to try to sight it in...one battery was dead when I opened it, and the free replacement died by the time I got back around to trying to sight it in. Even if I had gotten to try it, I don't know that it's possible to "sight in" a nerf blaster for the same reason Groove said: nerf blasters are not very consistent.
So, in the end, I'd definitely listen to Groove: if he says they aren't practical then they aren't practical. It could be fun to mess around with (and that may be worth $15 to you), but it isn't practical for a real war.
That's my...440 (wow)...words.
Edited by jwasko, 06 December 2007 - 07:50 PM.