A common question we get asked is, “why is Athena half the price of our competitors?” And it is true, Athena is half, sometimes even a third or a fourth of the price of our Electronic Scoring Target (EST) competitors. Yet Athena still offers both scoring accuracy and a full featured EST system. Simply put, the answer is we have a commitment to our customers and a commitment to our community to deliver technology that benefits the shooting sports.
When we developed Athena we rejected the status quo; we rejected the idea that an EST should cost $4000 or more a firing point. $4000 is just too expensive for athletes training at home or local clubs building out their range. Instead, we embraced innovation, new ideas, and most importantly technology that delivers value to our customers.
Commercial Off the Shelf Parts, or COTS, are parts manufactured in bulk by another company. Using COTS is much cheaper than designing and building your own, usually a tenth of the price or less. Whenever possible we relied on COTS to build Athena. Both the DoW100 Athlete Monitor and MM100 Spectator Display are 100% COTS hardware. The NC100 and NC200 each have multiple COTS parts internally. By using COTS we can pass the savings onto our customers.
Every engineer who works for Scopos is a shooter. This allows us to start every project with a common knowledge about the sport. For example when we started the project to support start-from-zero Finals, we all knew what Finals were, what the course of fire is, and even the implicit knowledge of the biggest moments of excitement during the Final. Having knowledge about the sport saved us valuable time that our customers never had to pay for.
History is littered with examples of American ingenuity. The Wright Brothers flying the first plane, Thomas Edison inventing the first telephone, or Steve Jobs coming up with the personal computer. The shooting sports need an affordable EST, and Scopos was the one to do it.
Our mission at Scopos is to turn shooting into a spectator sport. One way we will achieve this goal is by innovating solutions that are a value to our customers. Given our mission, we think the question isn’t “why is Athena affordable?” The question that needs to be answered is, “why are our competitors so expensive?”
