Originally Posted by
caylegeorge
I have a recollection of reading an article somewhere years ago about the Ironmen in the late 80's early 90's, where it talked about how they were using a special run of paint from their manufacturers that they deemed "ironball." Apparently it was a larger caliber paint, and measured out at about .70 - logic being a larger/heavier/more force = more range and more breaks on target. Made a lot of sense. Was this real or just a tall tale?
It made me think about the recent trend of shrinking ball size and caliber and raised a question - Why aren't we seeing a brand out their today marketing and pushing a "larger" ball? (or at least a normal "old size" ball)
It seems with all the pseudo science that is often in paintball marketing, there would be actual real reasons why a paint manufacturer would be able to say "bigger=better so buy ours for a premium price".
...I guess i'm just annoyed with shrinking paint
Back in the early days of paintball (and for some time after) there were a lot of misconceptions about what would make paintballs fly farther or more accurately. While I've never confirmed whether or not .70ish (I heard and crunched numbers about .71) paintballs existed, some time ago, I was able to extrapolate their performance, assuming that they had similar fills, and were similarly smooth. Here is the short form of what I found (assuming muzzle velocity of 300FPS, @ 1kft altitude, 70deg air temp, and avg humidity):
A .683, 3g DXS Silver paintball:
Maximum Range: 94 Yards
Angle for Max Range: 26 Degrees
Terminal Energy: .453FtLb
A theoretical .710, 3.4g paintball:
Maximum range: 96 yards
Angle for Max range: 26 Degrees
Terminal Energy: .526FtLb
The reason why the larger ball doesn't do proportionately better is because while the .71 is bigger, it also has more drag. I don't have the numbers in front of me at the moment but, this also causes the larger projectiles to drift very similarly to the smaller projectiles.
So, this in itself may explain why they didn't persist or expand beyond those alleged uses. A custom run of paint that only brings roughly two yards of range (and the same amount of drift) would probably not meet the best cost/performance point.
If you increased the density however, that's where real gains come in (but, that also will cause harder hits at any distance).
Originally Posted by
blackdeath1k
True. But what percent of current players even remember the true 68 caliber balls. I'm guessing most only know of the baby balls.
Back when this sport started if I'm not mistaken there were 3 different size balls. 68 being the middle of the road. And ultametly the one that won out for the l long term.
Nope. Wetworks got it right. In the early days, there were three potential competitors: .50, .62, and .68 (however none of these projectiles were accurate to the thousandths place and they were mostly larger than their advertised size (i.e. .689).