I think you're spot on about scopes trashing themselves is a flip of the coin. I have a friend who built a 416 Remington, and had the reticle break on 2 Swarovski's in under 15 rounds each. Now, Swarovski's are excellent scopes, so go figure

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I also used to hear a lot about the objective bell of the 50mm and larger scopes breaking off when used on big bores. I had an engineer friend tell me that the large objective scopes would be more prone to breaking off the bell-something about the combination of recoil, mass, size weight, inertia, etc. I don't understand it. That's why he's an engineer, and I'm a salesman