So I was Thinking about a New Gun Design.....

[AGD]

All,

So I was sitting around the other day watching Top Gear and thinking how advanced the latest sports cars were. I think to myself, "they are advancing just like paintball guns" and then I had to stop a minute.... I was wrong. If a paintball gun was transformed into a sports car, you would have an electronic sensor on the gas pedal that opened the carberator, THAT'S ALL!!

That got me thinking about what it would take to make a marker as advanced as today's Ferrari's. First of all, to get advanced control, you need to know what the car or the marker is doing. For the marker this means it knows what the velocity is for every single shot. Once it knows the velocity, then you need a way to control the velocity on every shot regardless of other factors like tank pressure etc. Just like fuel injection, this would require direct injection of the gas into the bolt chamber behind the ball. You could then dynamically adjust the timing so no matter what the tank pressure was, you would get the same velocity out. No regulators in the gun, at all. Just the tank feeding high pressure into the computerized injection system and your good to go.

So that was a cool idea, and it got me thinking further. If you could control the gas injection directly into the chamber, you can control the profile of the power pulse to the ball. Longer-lower pressure or higher-shorter but for this you would need to control two injection ports. This would allow you to shoot really fragile paint and make the gun very quiet with a long pulse at the expense of efficiency. Conversely you could make it bark with stronger paint and get much better efficiency.

Then I thought about how you could combine those parameters to best suit your game. It suddenly made sense that if I had a marker that did that, I would program it to shoot the first couple shots very quietly but once I started jack hammering it would automatically go to the high efficiency mode. This would allow me to sneak in the first couple shots without alerting my opponent but still give me great efficiency!!

But that lead to more ideas..... If you can inject the air into the chamber, at a pre-determined time, you could do it WHEN THE BALL WAS ROLLING PAST THE PORT! If you did this, it would rub the ball against one side of the barrel and induce a spin. With three independently controlled ports, below and on each side, you could get the ball to float or hook left or right just with the press of a button!

This would be like stepping out from behind your bunker or tree about 10 feet to take the shot. I also will bet you that a ball spinning and hooking left or right will be more accurate (left and right but not up and down). This is because you are controlling where on the back of the ball the vortexes are being shed from. They are NOT random. Cockerpunk should test this.

So why would I mention really cool designs on a pubic forum? Because I don't think there are any companies left in this industry with the ability to conceive, design and then finance a truly revolutionary product at this time. There are some guys with the ability (Chris Goddard and Simon come to mind) but there are no companies that I would have confidence in that could do it.

Just thinking out loud.....

AGD

[cockerpunk]

watch out with the air-induced spin ideas. the high speed video shows that doesn't work too well. now you can use friction to induce spin, but pure air is difficult. quite frankly, it is really hard to beat out the apex for induction and control of spin. i would like an apex though that was smaller profile so i could actually aim my gun with one of those things.

a solenoid that is fast enough and resolute enough to control that much air would be a pretty sweet engineering feat! although your solution is pretty eligent and solves a multitude of other technical issues.




sorry to sound negative, i am actually not trying to shoot down your ideas in the least. im very pleased to hear that your thinking paintball again. we'd all love to have you back.

[AGD]

Cocker,

Its not air induced, the air pushes the ball against the opposite wall of the barrel to get it started.

AGD

[cockerpunk]

Cocker,

Its not air induced, the air pushes the ball against the opposite wall of the barrel to get it started.

AGD

thats how some people claimed backspin bolts work, push the ball up against the top of barrel to get them to spin.

just giving you a hard time tom, im very pleased to see you mulling these ideas around. i would love to dream that something was in the works ...

[wetwrks]

So when are you releasing this new gun?

Oh, and I want mine in a red to gold fade and serial #1.

[Epic_Scotsman]

Its true especially with the state the economy is in.

However wouldn't this require a new regulator on your HA tank?


and in another note

OMG its TOM!!

[Enemy]

hey tom you think weve come far with todays tech in cars they are working on variable compression engines to go from regular ignition to auto ignition giving gas motors deisel like efficiency..

It is a very good idea though I think put to design, gremlins would start showing up everywhere, consistency of the injectors, actual ability of the injectors to control pressure and so fourth.

Though we could do one better with the use of piezioelectric sp? injectors perhaps using them to boost pressure and ultimately have a lp gun that fires hp amounts of air, for those that dont know those are the uber expensive injectors used in deisels and direct injection gas engines that put out about 20,000 psi fuel sprays.

[oldironmudder]

I would look into diesel injectors since they can handle the pressure, 60,000psi no problem & have the speed, 2000rpms is something like 33 cycle per second. The Cummins ISX injectors use fuel to adjust the timing.

I havent been around a diesel since Feb, job change, so Im a little rusty on the details but I have the info here.

[Shirow]

Interesting thoughts. I particularly like the silent 2 shot/efficient rapid fire idea. XXX-Mag?

[kruger]

The only true way to know how to shape the shot is to know the exact pressure in the tank. You could do that with a pressure transmitter. Also, with the miniaturization available today, this idea is not that far fetched. I could see this working with just two solenoids.

[jade_monkey07]

So why would I mention really cool designs on a pubic forum? Because I don't think there are any companies left in this industry with the ability to conceive, design and then finance a truly revolutionary product at this time. There are some guys with the ability (Chris Goddard and Simon come to mind) but there are no companies that I would have confidence in that could do it.

AGD

I think you just challenged yourself, along with the rest of the industry

[oldironmudder]

Some time ago I had an idea that would help control a marker & give a much more consistent fps reading. You would need a chrono on the end of the barrel like the old PVI Shocker, a pressure sensor that would tell the controller what psi the ball will see & if its an ep marker need another sensor for the LP air that feeds the noid. A tank pressure sensor could also be used & be like the Angel Air & tell you how many shots are left in the tank. You could take it far enough to be crazy but could help, ball weight sensor. By knowing the weight of the ball you could lower the amount the controller would be guessing.

The first shot would always be the worst one since it would be used to start the base for the shooting session. The ball would sit in the breech & be weighed. The controller would take that info & compare it to a permanent chart & base the dwell of the noid on that. Which would give the controller its first chrono reading to adjust the fps on the next shot along with the pressure in the marker.

Just looking at current ECMs in cars & trucks, they take info from coolant temp, air temp, air pressure & more just to figure out how much fuel to inject to try & achieve the best fuel ratio for its current driving condition.

I did a search for injectors, diesel, & watched this video first. Liked it & didnt bother looking for anything else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGwV9ueHcz4

The injector allows several injections to better the overall combustion cycle which would allow for a very very soft burst to get the ball moving. Then after that dump enough to get the ball up to speed. It would also let you get a few quite shots then ramp up like Tom said.


Ok, working thrid shift & thinking this hard is hurting my head.... time to cool down.

[nerobro]

Just to be sily, it would take a fairly large valve to do this with air. (at least the controlled profile valve chamber injection)

Maybe feed a diesel injector with liquid CO2? That would allow use of common parts for testing. IIRC, they've started using peizo technology in that sort of injector to allow them very precise timing. And a carefully controlled fuel curve.

Perhaps a simple/cheap solution would be to run two different valves, one for slow injection, one for fast injection. Or, with a $8 servo, you could potentially move a valvebody to switch between quiet pressure rise and fast pressure rise. that may be cheaper than going with a crazy injector capable of being driven with PWM and still give the same quiet-fast switch.

Aprillia has done high pressure air/fuel emulsion injection, that might have some relation to what we're looking at here.

Would a single port be enough to setup a consistant spin? Would a carefully designed groove do better?

The controllers to do this are out there... You'd need to step it up from the low end pics and avr's that are common now, and you'd probally need to revive the emag style battery pack. This could go places..

There we go, Tom's got me thinking again.

Excuse me while I go look at injectors...

EDIT: This would also allow for a player to "fix" paint breakage issues on the fly. If you're breaking paint, hit a button, goto delicate mode, and now you can shoot eggshells.

EDIT again: And why hasn't anyone introduced damping into guns? it seems that companies are finally starting to address how the guns "feel" to the user. the last time I saw anything that really addressed damping were the timing shocks on the tippman F/A.

[vf-xx]

Haven't we gone over this idea before in some bits?

We're talking about integrating a chrony into the gun again, which I think is a good thing, But that does give some technical issues.

Is there any way to do that and not have it integrated into the barrel?

Would you even still need a bolt, or would you go to a feedgate like an epic?

[nerobro]

Successful gun designs are always simple. Feedgates aren't easy to seal, and run into the mag problem of kicking the ball stack hard, and they're defininitely not simple. Bolts are better, especially once you get the rof up.

I wouldn't suggest integrating a chrony into a gun. There's to many potential ways for that to be a problem. It's a neat trick, but the ref at the chrony is the one that matters.

The spin idea would require some barrel integration. The machining necessary to make that work is pretty simple. Almost dremel simple.

We are looking at several technologies here. First is electronically controlled valving, this has never been done beyond a "digital" implmentation. Second adaptive firing profiles, this has been done in the past, but not always well implemented, and always only applied to maxrof. Third is electronically controlled spin. They should be treated separately for purposes of our discussion. Each technology could be game changing.