Rate of Fire

[nerraD]

Some consideration I was giving to rate of fire:

There is never a time in paintball when you need to shoot faster then when sweet spotting off the break. To consider the worst-case scenario, I'll use an Olympic sprinter who can run the 100m race in 10 seconds. This works out to 10m/sec or 30ft/sec. Now to make sure that we nail him, we need to put a ball across his path every time he moves another 2 feet.

2ft @ 30ft/sec = about 0.07 seconds to cover 2 feet.

So it stands to reason then that we need to fire a ball every 0.07 seconds which works out to a little over 14bps.

Now consider the following factors, which are harder to quantitate:

No paintball field gives a player 100m to accelerate and get up to speed.
No paintball player can sprint as fast as an Olympic athlete.
I would think that an average speed of half or 15 feet per second. Which would mean that only half the rate of fire or 7bps are really required to hit the player.

Then we'll take in to account the inherent inaccuracies of a paintball. Doubling the required rate of fire to average out the inaccuracies should be more than adequate, so that brings us back to 14bps.

Am I wrong in thinking that more than 14bps is excessive and completely unnecessary?

[sniper1rfa]

it would be unneccesary.
BTW, we had this discussion over at the tinkers guild.
this is what wat (no pun intended) had to say about a runner going perpindicular (sp?) to your line of fire...

"Basically, you want the interval between shots to be the minimum amount of time it takes for a player to cross his body width. Now, assuming we're talking of a healthy tape player who is only say....8" thick looking at his side profile. Using your speed estimate of 25ft/sec or 300 inches per second, a player will clear his entire body width in 0.0267 seconds. So you need to have paint zipping in at a rate faster than 1 every 0.0267 seconds or a rate of fire of 1/0.0267 or 37.5bps. At skyball, we found that if you double up a lane with two guns, you could almost always pick off a runner before he made it to the corner post. Figure two happy angels at 14bps gives you 28bps or one ball every 0.0357 seconds. This gives a runner a margin of error of only 0.009 seconds or 2.7"

Things get alot easier if you're going after a fat back player. Say we're going after a guy 3x fatter at 24" thick and ran 3 times slower at only 100 inches per second, you'd only have to shoot 4.167 balls per second. A good pumper should be able to tag that.

These of course, are numbers for 100% guaranteed hits."

[ShinyGuy]

http://www.automags.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13645