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Old 07-22-2008, 08:28 PM
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Draven Draven is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by General Grim View Post
Draven, that's the problem, you're comparing two fundamentally different things. Glitter which rarely reflects already existing light to the goggles and sparks (deflagerating pieces of combustible material with the reaction being sped up by traveling through the air) which generate their own light source and often are quite luminous. To be completely fair and to stop working off theories we would need a third party to verify the effects of glitter on night vision devices. What further invalidates the first video provided is the fact that those sparks would be clearly visible to the blind eye.
Your actually very correct in your assessment, except that the glitter would reflect such light back at the goggles. Granted it wouldn't be as bright as the sparks unless you had the IR on. Remember the "glitter" would have a similar effect as rain reflecting light back to the NVGs, and would only last a second or two at best (thus that system of defense has its own flaw).

How I discovered that glitter worked in such a way was during a force on force exercise, someone tossed a flash bang and the foil that was expelled from the flash bang, reflected the light from outside (behind me) and obscured my vision. It lasted for a about a second or two, but any distraction in a fire fight isn't good.

Also, as you noticed from both videos, the NVGs are a single color so anything with a darker shade can blend in. Basically camouflage still works against NVGs as it does with normal vision. Neither system is fool proof and the US Army doesn't make know the weaknesses of field equiptment so ypu can imagine how hard a third party will be to find.
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