Introduction

A night vision device (NVD) is an optical system designed to amplify light energy and electronically enhance viewing, thus allowing images to be produced in almost complete darkness. The heart of any night vision system is an image intensifier tube which magnifies the amount of available light from natural sources. Intensifier tubes consist of a photocathode and a microchannel plate: the photocathode converts light images to electron flow which is then amplified and converted back to the light image on the microchannel plate.

Night vision goggle (NVG) is a specific type of night vision device. Night vision binoculars are NVG consisting of dual eyepieces and magnification lenses. Night vision monocular, on the other hand, has only one eyepiece and can also be mounted to firearms as night sights.

Live Resin is a resin company from Russia, specialized in producing high quality modern figure weapon and accessory aftermarket sets in 1/35 scale. This review describes their US Army NVG PVS 14 Monocular with mounts (LRE-35026) set.

Review

The US Army NVG PVS-14 Monocular set comes safely secured between a standard Live Resin cardboard backing with resin pieces packed inside a zip-lock bag. The box art on the front shows all the kit parts, while the one on the back demonstrates NVG installation procedure to Live Resin MICH helmet.

The set consists of 10 AN/PVS-14 Monocular NVGs and 10 NVG helmet mounts (5 mount assemblies are depicted flipped up and 5 mounts are depicted flipped down). The parts are molded in grey resin and, as with all Live Resin kits I reviewed so far, there are no imperfections in the cast. The pieces are small and very delicate with loads of details nicely delivered in scale.

The AN/PVS-14 Monocular Night Vision Device (MNVD) is a lightweight night vision device manufactured by Litton Industries / ITT Corporation and is in widespread use by US Armed Forces as well as NATO allies around the world. AN/PVS-14 uses a Gen 3 image intensifier tube featuring a manual gain control which allows the user to increase or decrease image tube brightness for greater image contrast in varying light conditions. It can be used in several modes: hand held, head mounted, helmet mounted or fixed and boresighted to a rifle with aiming light. NVG helmet mount can be installed onto the MICH helmet by screw or retention strap. It features full flip-up design, allows front-back and tilt adjustment, and fits various ITT NVGs.

The AN/PVS-14 is presented very realistically in this set. All the tiny knobs and buttons are incredibly well defined. The night vision device fits nicely to the NVG mount, although you might need an optivisor for handling the tiny pieces. This set should be combined with any of the various MICH helmet sets available separately from Live Resin.

Conclusion

This kit features the most widely used Monocular NVG in the US Army: AN/PVS-14. The resin cast is perfect and features tiny, but incredibly well defined details. With 20 pieces (10 copies of AN/PVS-14 and 10 NVG mounts), this set presents an absolutely great value for money.

Thanks to Yaroslav from Live Resin for this review sample.

References

Global security
Wikipedia article
SpecWarGear