Normally I would be for it but right now the FLIR is just too powerful of a weapon all its own. Instead of being a case of "there is heat over there" it is a case of "there is a target right there", with no heat from the surrounding environment or anything to make the environment stand out from the targets themselves it's all too easy to stop said targets regardless of the time of day.

Add in a rangefinder and suddenly thermal becomes a "win" filter.

If you're worried about balancing issues, you can always choose to replace the rangefinder with standard binoculars for a mission.

There is a lazar designator that is as part of the new Beta, it’s an uprated version of the standard rangefinder with lazing facility, it also has night vision and thermal imaging modes, the lazar function is dependent on a separate battery, so until you add a battery the lazing function doesn’t work but NV/TI modes do along with the standard rangefinder functions.

The lazar designator can be found in the blue/red/green “support” ammo crate and its battery in the blue/red “supply box”, the greens don’t have a supply box, thus don’t have access to batteries unless they use blue/red “supply box”

Currently no units are assigned the lazar designator by default as far as I know.

I agree with NodUnit, It is not necessarily balancing at all but the fact that it makes the game too easy and there would be no challenge, unfortunately this is one of the only posts I have downvoted but I would say leave this up to a mod. There needs to be some challenges to this game so a skill can be gained I.E. eyesight.

Mass closing ancient tickets with no activity for > 12 months; assume fixed or too trivial.

If this issue is still relevant in current dev build, please re-post.