With a week of awesome new products from Magpul, this one was the most surprising and offers biggest chance at being a game changer.
The Army has long indicated their desire for a Round Counter capability to inform both the shooter and others an idea of how many rounds they have in their weapon as well as data on how many rounds the weapon has fired for maintenance. The X4-FCS does that and so much more.
Designed in conjunction with Maztech Industries, the X4-FCS is an appliqué for your existing LPVO, transforming it into a smart optic.
The system takes multiple independent inputs from around the firearm and fuses the data to communicate with the shooter (and others if needed) to build situational awareness on the target area and weapon status. The system provides powered or unpowered magazine awareness with data sent to multiple displays.
It offers a secure communications capability with Bluetooth, Near Field Communication and Ultra Wideband systems.
They aren’t stopping here. They anticipate other systems on the X4 roadmap integrate into the FCS to provide selectable inputs, ranging and target illumination, and shooter enhanced visual awareness.
The X4-FCS promises to do provide most, if not all of the capability of the recently selected Next Generation Squad Weapon – Fire Control except this can be used in conjunction with existing optics.
The photos shared here are of a developmental system and what Magpul shows at SHOT Show next week isn’t even the final product.
-Eric Graves, Editor
Pretty cool, looking forward to learning more!
My two cents:
This is the future and Magpul seems to embracing it by branching out from accessories —> to enablers.
In competition:
1) Sig Sauer already has their BDX 2.0 electro-optics line of scopes that Bluetooth connects to rangefinders, Kestrels and Garmins.
2) Vortex Optics just won the US Army NGSW-Fire Control system that integrates Optics, Ballistic computers and range finders into a single optice for the soldier.
3) NGSW program has a weapon mounted battery pack as part of the competition to power such future devices
If Magpul can turn things like buttstocks, pistol grips, hand guards and magazines into weapon enablers that would truly be a “game changer”. Additionally, I sincerely hope that this is focused on the war fighter and not competition shooting. Everyone hates proprietary, so if Magpul could come up with an open software and system architecture and allow free use of it (e.g. M-LOK), it surely would speed up adoption.
Powered rail is no longer a requirement of NGSW. The Army continues development in parallel. I
When can I buy this? What will it come with? What are the specifications & life expectations of the furniture?
I honestly don’t know how to feel about this. Assistive technology is great, I just seem to have a hard time feeling fuzzy about this. The video talks about eliminating the need to take your eyes off target to check your round count, but I don’t really feel that is a mainstream issue. For people that need to worry about that, training is the answer. How many of us subconsciously count our rounds, and have a pretty darned good idea of how many we have left after shooting? That’s directly related to training time. For those that don’t get that training time, do they really need to know how many rounds they have left without taking their eyes off target? Just an observation. I think I prefer the witness slots on magpul mags. Simple, fast (at least in daylight). I believe that the need for this is very limited in scope.