Bastion launched a co-development effort with a Toulouse-area photonics laboratory in August 2020 to prototype stabilized EO/IR balls for scout vehicles and mast mounts—the origin of today’s Clarity line.
The partnership split work cleanly: lab teams owned detector and cooling packages; Bastion owned vehicle integration, shock loads, and exportable maintenance docs.
First flight-like mast trials on a partner truck bed followed that winter. Engineers emphasized that “sensor excellence dies without a maintainable cable harness”—a line still used in Clarity training.
By 2023 Clarity balls were catalog items; the 2020 co-dev papers remain the design baseline for hunter-killer sight packages on Pathfinder and Citadel variants.
Source note. Figures cited above come from public
manufacturer product cards, open program documentation, and widely
reported official characteristics. Exact values can vary by
variant, software load, and national configuration.