Earlier this year Nocturn Industries teased a photo of their Chimera quadtube panoramic night vision goggle (PNVG). See the image below. The prototype used ANVIS10 eyepieces and RPO objective lenses. What was truly interesting was the fact this goggle housing is articulated.
Quadtube Pano Night Vision @ TFB:
- Friday Night Lights: PP-NVG (Panning Panoramic Night Vision Goggles)
- Friday Night Lights: QTNVG – Panos For The Masses
- Friday Night Lights: Ground Panoramic Night Vision Goggles (GPNVG)
- Friday Night Lights: DIY Build Your Own Quadtube – ANVIS10
Well in the past couple of weeks, Nocturn Industries has officially named them the Chimera and released more photos.
Standard fixed bridge quadtubes like the GPNVG, ANVIS10, and QTNVG look like the image above when the goggle is flipped up on the helmet. You have a sort of antler look to your helmet. Just like a pair of binos or even a single PVS-14, when flipped up, they stick out far from the helmet. Well, the Chimera solves this problem with an articulating bridge. Each side can articulate upwards like an articulated binocular night vision device.
When you flip the NVG mount up, the pods can swing back closer to the helmet making it more comfortable in the stored position.
If you look closely, you can see the core of the Chimera bridge is a Katana. They simply added arms that attach to quad tube pods. One thing to know about quad tube goggles is that articulation cannot be used to set pupillary distance. It is fine for binos because you are swinging circular images. This won’t work with quad tube pods. You need the pods to stay in line with each other. Otherwise, the three-bean pod Venn diagram of images will be cattywampus. So when the arms are deployed (see the image above), there are these flanges that stick out and act as hard stops to keep the arms parallel with the horizon. Interpupillary distance adjustment is handled like normal quad tube bridges with adjustment screws that translate the pods left and right.
The Nocturn Chimera is not a proprietary system. They have plans to make bridges so legacy quad tube users can upgrade. Below is a Chimera bridge designed to work with GPNVG pods. They will also make bridges for ANVIS10 and QTNVG pods.
As mentioned above, the Chimera is based off their UANVB (Katana) family of products. Since it uses the UANVB core, they can build any style of Chimera you want. They can make any of the following setups for a Chimera build.
- onboard power (single CR123)
- Onboard power with LEMO for remote power
- remote power only (UANVB-OC Samurai) style
- Aluminum core w/ polymer arms
While the price is not locked in quite just yet, they project a fully built Chimera starting at $15k. Housing with glass will be around $7600 and the bridge alone, for legacy quad tube users like me, will be $2500. Nocturn has a lot more coming next year and we will see them at SHOT Show 2023. I have a sample UANVB-OC (Samurai) on loan and you can look forward to reading my review of it as the first FNL of the year on January 6th.
