Sights on the Prize

Award Winning Team Deliver Award Winning Sight

SAKER is a Fused Weapon Sight (FWS) providing the Dismounted Close Combat User with an enhanced Detect, Recognise and Identify capability combining image intensifier and uncooled thermal imaging sensors into a single sight unit conceived, designed, manufactured and delivered within a tight time schedule by a British design team.

Through discussions with user groups and customers the requirement for a fused weapon sight became clear. A top level specification was generated using Company knowledge of the target market, plus inputs from DSTL (UK MOD). This was used to determine the requirements; SAKER would require the combination of two complementary but very different technologies.

The Design Team faced a number of challenges. SAKER needed to be compact, lightweight and to have low power consumption. SAKER also needed to give all the recognition and identification advantages of a visible image, coupled with the detection capability of the thermal image combined into one sight. In order to achieve this a number of innovations needed to be made in the package, the two objectives and the image combining optics.

A key feature of the product would be an innovative combination of optical, mechanical and electronic technologies to provide the optimum size, weight, power and cost trade-offs. The electronic design and the collimator optics provided an interesting challange. The conventional approach for the design of the collimation optics can result in a complex and expensive collimator. To avoid this problem, the team used electronics processing to scale the TI image on the display,  resulting in a much simplified collimation optic.

The SAKER team delivered two fully operational prototypes with a total of 4174 person-hours required to deliver the project on time resulting in SAKER winning “Best Situational Awareness Device” at the WBR Soldier Technology Conference. The team’s efforts were also quickly recognised with them winning the “Design Team of the Year Award 2012” at the Beea “British Engineering Excellence Awards”

The Awards aim to demonstrate and promote the quality of engineering design within the UK and to provide a benchmark of excellence. They also serve to demonstrate the power of engineering design innovation within the UK to the world. The Judges said of the Qioptiq SAKER team: “This was a very challenging multidisciplinary design delivered on time by a really strong team.” Qioptiq has demonstrated what can be achieved by recognising a requirement and having the right team determined to deliver it.