Message to AGD:

[LK-13]

Not an issue. I believe TK still owns Perfect Circle Paintball... That would be a help.

Besides that though, I think it would just take too much power. I have no need to walk around with a huge battery in a backpack...

do you mean this Perfect Circle Paintball :

http://www.pcpaintball.com/index.html

[grEnAlEins]

do you mean this Perfect Circle Paintball :
http://www.pcpaintball.com/index.html

Affirmatory

[sdlm_]

What about this?

Design a Blow forward internally similar to the Automag, however instead of a sear use Air Pressure to hold back the bolt, and use a little pnuematic piston to close the on/off (I.e a piston where one side is has a much larger surface area to allow low pressure to close the hp on/off)...

When you pull the trigger, it moves a three way valve, venting the air holding the bolt back, and putting air into the bottom of a new on//off piston to close the flow through the marker.

As I understand Patents, this gets around PTPs patent, due to the fact that there is no sear to automate. It could fire very fast, have more or less he same relability as an Automag, and only minor changes would have to take place in the body (There could be no sear groove, just a 10-32 hole for QEV or the like). With the addition of an O-ring I do believe normal Automag bolts could even be used.

More importantly unlike homemade pneumag conversations, this wouldn't really need any adjusting, just put the LPR up to wherever it needs to be, and put some setscrews in the trigger to determine the pull and you are ready to go.

I am sorry if such an Idea has already been presented.

.

Does anyone know for certain if my Idea Above would Violate the PTP patent? It seems simple enough I might try and build it.

[questionful]

With an Ion 'noid? Build first, deal with patents later! Not that they matter as long as you don't sell it.

[Tao]

Okay...now for the real reason this thread was created...My idea:

It may not even be feasable (due to the SP patent crap), but I still feel it is worth looking into. I am sure you have read or heard about the Navy's plan to build and install a Rail Gun on its ships. I have been wondering for a while if that concept could be scaled down and utilized in a paintball gun. I am not an engineer, so there are a myriad of specifics that I do not have, but the basic concept is this: a bolt sits between two rails (an anode and a cathode). When the trigger is pulled, electrical current runs from the positive terminal of the power supply up the positive rail, through the bolt, and down the negative rail, back to the power supply. This flow of current makes the railgun act like an electromagnet, creating a powerful magnetic field in the region of the rails up to the position of the bolt. In accordance with the right-hand rule, the created magnetic field circulates around each conductor. Since the current flows in opposite direction along each rail, the net magnetic field between the rails is directed vertically. In combination with the current flowing across the bolt, this produces a Lorentz force which accelerates the bolt along the rails. There are also forces acting on the rails attempting to push them apart, but since the rails are firmly mounted they cannot move. The bolt slides up the rails away from the end with the power supply, resulting in the paintball (which is sitting in front of the bolt) to shoot out of the barrel. The bolt can be returned to the pre-firing condition by a spring.

One positive aspect I can think of is that the gun would be airless (no more bulky tank on the back of your gun). I am guessing that one major obstacle would be power - having a system that uses electricity to create the magnetic opposing force needed to move the bolt forward at @280 fps may require a lot of juice, meaning a big battery, or small batteries with less life. Like I said, I am not an engineer, so I don't really have a lot of specifics. But, I am sure that someone with the time and money it would take to R&D this might be able to pull it of. I figure, if anyone has the means or knowledge to do it, it might be you. What do you think?

Devil - Nah, I haven't managed to make it out to Tama Hills. We have been underway a lot. We are just about finished with our summer cruise. I am going to try to set something up for October or November, and see if I can drag some of the guys out there with me. In the past 8 months, I have bought about 4 guns that I have yet to take out on the field. I really would like to get some paint through them.

And to the butthole idiot who said AGD is dead, and to take my idea somewhere else: I really don't have anything to say to you. Just go away.

I thought about this idea but there is a problem. Normally the ball accellerates down the barrel, thus this system would need to accelerate that ball over a similar distance or else the ball would break. Such a system would be too slow to reset, or require so much energy you would have to carry around a very heavy battery. a way around that would be to use a megnetic paintball instead of a magnetic cradle, but this would be too much of a change to take hold in the industry.

[Tao]

With an Ion 'noid? Build first, deal with patents later! Not that they matter as long as you don't sell it.

Yeah except research and development is expensive......

[zipity_Bop]

paintball guns are floated theres not much more that can be done....

Wen need some paint ideas....

a way to get cheaper paint at a good quality would be awesome

[Ratt]

I'm not so sure that the Navy would implement a railgun unless it was to experiment. Rails guns are highly inefficient. Single shots via a high voltage capacitor bank if 100's of thousands + Farads is an event. There is a big trade off between the amount of juice to the mass and velocity of the object. Rapid fire shots from a railgun is a novel idea at best.

You obviously don't know what you are talking about. The Navy has been experimenting with such a rail gun, and one does exist, and they do plan on fitting it on future DDG's and CG's. Do a 'google' on 'rail gun Naval Surface Warfare Center Dalhgren Division', or go to wikipedia and type in 'rail gun'.

[SR_matt]

paintball guns are floated theres not much more that can be done....

Wen need some paint ideas....

a way to get cheaper paint at a good quality would be awesome

that has been said for years, same with computers. bill gates once said that a computer will never need more than 500 bites of ram and now his software requires a gig to run. people said cell phones couldnt get any better then apple came out with the iphone. there is always improvement. instead of going for ROF now though the things are going to efficenthy, light weight, consistancy, and size. you an always make things more eficent, smaller and more consistant no matter how good it is then.


heck in 10 years we might be looking back at the gns that are new now and going "wow 3 fps+/- those days were terrible for consistency"

-matt

[punkrex]

You obviously don't know what you are talking about. The Navy has been experimenting with such a rail gun, and one does exist, and they do plan on fitting it on future DDG's and CG's. Do a 'google' on 'rail gun Naval Surface Warfare Center Dalhgren Division', or go to wikipedia and type in 'rail gun'.

Im not gonna start a pissing contest but I have reasearched, designed and built railguns with a team of individuals.

I don't know much about the Navy but I am familair with military contracts of this nature. So I did a little google search and came up with this:

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,123818,00.html

Yeah, looks like the ones they have built are specifically for the purpose of R@D. No one has officially decreed that they are going to implement rail guns fleet wide. Please reread my post before you jump all over me, I said I wasn't sure that they were using one. And I still doubt that they will ever find a permenant place on board a warship.

And damn! They are talking mega joules of energy! That is a buttload of power...

[angrysasquatch]

that has been said for years, same with computers. bill gates once said that a computer will never need more than 500 bites of ram and now his software requires a gig to run. people said cell phones couldnt get any better then apple came out with the iphone. there is always improvement. instead of going for ROF now though the things are going to efficenthy, light weight, consistancy, and size. you an always make things more eficent, smaller and more consistant no matter how good it is then.


heck in 10 years we might be looking back at the gns that are new now and going "wow 3 fps+/- those days were terrible for consistency"

-matt

Yes, but the two examples you used are electronics. Electronics as a whole, improve at an incredible rate. However, mechanical devices, as a whole, move forward very slowly. And the railgun idea, could be done if the bolt was actuated by said mechanism, but I think the idea of what makes railguns so good is they accelerate the object along the entire length of the "barrel", thus iron paintballs would need to be invented. Probably not the safest projectile at 300 fps. And even if all those problems are solved, if the military is just doing it (and it isn't technology adapted from the commercial sector), its very, very expensive, and probably temperamental.

[Skoad]

you wouldn't need iron balls, just a paintball infront of a magnetic bolt of sorts. however slamming that against something to stop it from traveling forward wouldn't be that great, unless you polarized the end of a track to counter it before it reached the end. pretty complicated, don't expect it to ever reach paintball ;/

[Miscue]

I think all AGD needs is a new logo... like a moustache or something.

Quest,

The spring you describe sounds great but can not be made. In any case, the RT valve does slam wide open for full flow and then slams shut. The spring around the poppet valve actually has little to do with it, its all in the air flow against the piston. Keep thinking up ideas though!

AGD

[angrysasquatch]

No, the magnetic bolt would be a waste.

The advantage of railguns is that they can shoot things at very high velocities. In a gun, to shoot something faster, you'd put more powder behind the round. But, to actually get the power out of that round, you'd use a longer barrel, or else the gasses wouldn't have completely expanded by the time you got to the end of the barrel, so some of the pressure behind the shot vents into air and is wasted. More powder = more pressure, so you'd need a longer barrel to make the most of it. By the time you get to very long barrels (think artillery), the gasses created by all that combustion have to fill a very large volume which is the barrel by the time you get to the end of the barrel. Thus, as you increase the barrel size, the efficiency starts to drop off. if the efficiency is crap, you're gonna need a huge amount of powder (which adds weight to the boat, in this case, and allows you to carry less rounds).

Now, with a railgun, it gets rid of that inefficiency by basically having an infinite amount of small explosions behind it. Except in a railgun, it's just a constant magnetic force moving the round, not explosions. The problem with railguns is that they are useless built on a small scale. They are inefficient. However, the inefficiency stays as a straight line (energy in= x axis, energy out= y axis) when comparing energy in (electrical power):useful energy out(1/2 the mass of the projectile x the velocity squared). In firearms, the graph would start steeper than the railgun line, but it would curve towards flat as energy in increased. Where those two lines meet, is the point at which both are equally feasible.

A paintball moving at 300 fps is nowhere near that point. Railguns only become feasible in something with the muzzle energy of an artillery shell.


If you were going to move the bolt, you wouldn't use a railgun, you'd use something very simple, an electromagnet. However, if you tried to accelerate the paintball in .68 inches, which is the distance just about every bolt moves, the ball would break from the acceleration. You would have to make some sort of a ram type electromagnet with a very long throw (at least 5 inches) that can move in excess of 300 fps. Considering that the shaft of the ram would have to have a lot of iron in the material you chose, that would be a huge amount of weight which you accelerated to 300 fps in 5 inches. That's gonna be a whole lot of kick.

[kruger]

Just because I think that this is an interesting topic, I will throw in my two cents worth.

The idea of a railgun for military use is indeed a massive undertaking of money and technology. In military applications, you have to get the projectile up to astronomical speeds to accomplish your goal. You are also trying to sling a very heavy weight from a stand still to many times the speed of sound in a realativly short distance. That calls for high peak power output.

Now, if we were trying to sling a paintball at roughly 5 times the speed of sound, then, I would agree that it would be impratical to even attempt. The power required would be prohibitive to such a project. But, we are trying to just push a paintball less than half the speed of sound. The power requirements would bbe much less. You have less mass to sling, and you are not trying to acheive a very high speed. And, as I stated before, you dont need a bolt to ride the rails, that would be a mechanical nightmare. Kick would be very high, and you would still have to return the bolt to the starting position for the next shot. High rates of fire would require that the thing be built like a tank. If you had a paintball that had magnetic qualities, or even iron dust in the shell, then you would not even need a bolt. Just get the ball in the barrel and push the button. And, as to acceleration, we shoot paintballs with 850 lb bursts of air and they mostly survive that. So, we already know that the paintball will survive the shot. With electronics, you can modulate the pulse to accelerate the paintball down the wave and out the barrel at exactly 300 fps.

Is this concept doable? I think that it is. And, I think that it could be done at a price that would be acceptable to the masses. You would have trade offs with this type of marker. First, you loose the air tank. Depending on your point of view, that could be a good thing. But, you gain a battery pack. The power required for the shot would be high, but of short duration. Another plus would be a totally silent gun. And, if for no other reason than this, I think that it would be worth doing.

Is it practical? Not right now. There are too many manufacturers out there that are making money on the pneumatic designs that they have right now. But, you let one, high profile accident happen with a HP tank. Some senators kid gets hurt or killed with a freak accident with a HP Tank and they will want to ban those tanks and then the market would be better suited for this application.

Just my two cents worth.