Why .68? Why not .40 or .50 or .60?

[fearc7]

hey guys. so whats the best, heaviest paint on the market as of now?

[kemikos]

Originally posted by Jack & Coke

The origin of the .68 size is NOT base on paintball research. It is based on marking tree or cattle or horse stuff.

...

What if... there were no such thing as "paintball" (blasphemy!) and you had start from scratch. What size ball would you use? Remember, you have a manufacture ready to make ANY size you want.

Actually, you know, they didn't just decide they needed paint capsules that were .68 inches in diameter and invent the paintball to match...

Gel encapsulation (the process used to make paintballs) isn't just used to make paintballs. If you've ever taken a "gelcap"-type pill, you know what I'm talking about. The process has been around since long before Charlie Nelson needed something to hold enough paint to mark a tree...

Like any other industry, the encapsulation companies have standardized sizes; it turns out that .68" is the finished size of a standard "size 70 round" gel capsule.

Finding a manufacturer willing to make "any size you want" is possible, of course, but since they will have to make new tooling (dies, molds, and so on) just for your order, it's going to be prohibitively expensive compared to simply using an "off the shelf" size.

Incidentally, I bet that's why the old .60 paint was actually .62"; it might have been a size 65 capsule. And the Chinese .40 mykroft mentioned, which is actually .43", could very well be size 45.

I know it's not really answering the original question, but manike and others have already covered that pretty well...

[hitech]

Originally posted by manike
Yep, I started playing back in the days when you could turn up and choose your calibre :)

Nice to know I'm not the only one that remembers this stuff.

[tremis]

It's about as likely as any OS replacng windows on the desktop.

Hey I just dropped windows for Linux over memorial day and couldn't be happier with it.

Tremis

[shartley]

Originally posted by tremis


Hey I just dropped windows for Linux over memorial day and couldn't be happier with it.

Tremis

Oh no! Windows is DOOMED!

(heehee)

[bigsarge72]

Yeah, we did have .50 cal back in the day...enter, the Crossman 3357. It looked like a pistol and held like 8 shots or something like that. It also stunk, and the balls didnt' break as well as the .68.
Pretty much the only gun I remember using the .62 cal was Tippmans gun (one of his early autos).
I think what might be a better issue is to lower velocity a little, if people are worried about getting wacked by a .68 cal ball. We limit at 300 for most tourney's for safety reasons, but guns shoot just fine between 280 and 290 (in fact most guns shoot best around 280), and it seems to not hurt quite as much closer to 280, but maybe that's just perception.

[Vegeta]

I beive this belongs in Deep Blue.

The smaller the paintball, the more mass of the ball the shell takes up. That means less paint and more shell... leading to a more painful inpact at the same speed of a paintball.

[bigsarge72]

Oh, and I forgot about one other small caliber, high velocity "paintball", simunitions. 9mm, not sure about velocity, but I heard they hurt like heck too.
For those not familiar with these, police and military use them for training. You put them in a regular gun (with a kit installed), so you can conduct realistic training.

sarge

[Timmee]

Actually, 40 caliber paintballs are used in blowguns, and the Splatmatic XJ40 (I own one). While this may not be practical for play against other people, 40 caliber can be used quite nicely as a target shooter. It leaves a visual marker of a hit (as compared to a bb or pellet), it's very efficient (100 shots off a 12g), and with it's reduced volume of fill, there's less to clean off than with a normal marker. I'd personally prefer a 40 caliber marker to a bb or pellet gun.

[Nitroduck]

Lets think a little bit.

Ok, say we changed to 62 cal...

If then we upped our velocity, we'd create a higher force on the smaller impact point. Lets add something you never thought about in. Insurance. Because of a smaller, faster paintball, the chances of it doing more damage to someone would increase. People would be coming off the field with worse welts, and possibly bloody. Would parents like that? They wouldn't. Theres more factors that just ballistics.

[mike e]

not necesarily you forget that the less weight in the smaller paintball would lower the force, but i dont have any numbers on the mass of paintballs of different sizes to do the math. my guess is though that best case scenerio the paintballs would have the same amount of impact force, but more likely the smaller ball would have less.

[paintbattler]

.68 sounds better....

[banzaimf]

Kemikos has got it right. We adopted a standard, already tooled size from the pharmaceutical industry.

banzaimf

and my crossman 3357 is going hungry, no paint I can find.

[Dragoon]

I remember playing with .62 cal. In fact a feild owner and myself looked into converting his pgp rentals to .62

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned, but that my friend used to swear to, is that the .62 had a flatter tradjectory. I have no clue if this is true or just his impression.

Do any of you more scientifically minded have any reasons why this may or may not be true?

Douglas

[manike]

Originally posted by Dragoon
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned, but that my friend used to swear to, is that the .62 had a flatter tradjectory. I have no clue if this is true or just his impression.

Do any of you more scientifically minded have any reasons why this may or may not be true?

At short ranges the .62 pellets used to travel faster and thus would have a flatter trajectory over such ranges.

At long ranges they would drop off more due to less energy to overcome air resistance. Making it hard to be accurate at long range.

At even longer ranges they wouldn't reach targets that .68 cal pellets would with enough energy to break.

manike