What's next? PBall future.

[Shaft]

So what's next for the realm of paintball? The gear has reached some interesting highs. Reliable electronic triggered guns that can outshoot the loaders that feed them. We're no longer forced to run around with a big "target" hopper on top of the gun.

The first thing to see will be more cheap alternatives using high end features. The $200 electro.

I'd like to see cost cutting become the next wave of PBall technology.

Make paint cost less!! If quality has to go down, make these markers able to fire lousy paint cleanly and accurately. (Breaking on the target would be a different issue.) Do both!

[CoFFeY[NiTrO]]

yeah that would be nice. only like $30 to go paintballing.
15 - to play all day at my field
15 - for 2000 balls


. - . I WisH . - .

[Shaft]

I don't know too much about boltless. I think another thread there was talk that there ROF is much lower.
It's very possible for this to change. How would the boltless handle cheap paint over bolt guns?

[davisdawg123]

i shoot at least my hopper out a game, if not more, it would be nice to see paint prices go down.....a lot

[rightsidefight]

if comapanies decreased the grade of the paint by say adding thinner paint or watering the paint down there would be more paint to fill the balls.with the company saving the extra paint,the could make more hopefully decreasing the paint cost.also why doesnt anyone try a ew type of gas system?i would like to see something like an oxygen tank wch as a byproduct fills a co2 compartment with you will get paid to epty fo co2 fills.that would be quit interesting

[MagNumPI]

The paint in the balls are made to leave a clear mark.. if the player is hit with a watered down ball then the mark will be way less visable. No to get the lower prices we need to find a good fill, good shell that is cheap and then just go from there. ............ I don't know what the heck my point was...


Future of paintball Electros are the furture but is it realy a good thing.. What is so great about the electro guns?

ROF is higher. Sure thats good.. no wait you spend twice as much. And If the guy behind the bunker is not comming out for 1-4 shots i can bet cash money that he is not comming out for 10-15 of em. I have and always will be a semiauto guy, this way you get some feel for the game. Pumps, remeber them.. the ones we had to cock manualy befor we shot.. not alot of them left.. they are out gunned by the Semis and now by the electro's. Wish they had more pump games..

In conclusion, Tournements are gonna be a big part of the game, they will attract the ppl to play(which is why i think they should use them strictly for advertising , cause there is not a whole lot of strategy that can go on in 3 mins) Recballers are gonna be the meat and potatoe of the sport, companies should look into spending more money of helping the local fields and recplayer. It started in the bush , by god it's gonna always stay in the bush.

[Vegeta]

I would like to see more concepts developed by the player. And more companies taking opinions like AGD and Tom do here at the forum. And also, i think htere sould be some sort of marker development contest. I got thios idea from hearing about the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint Strike Fighter Project and the NASA Space challenge competition. A ordinary player (cannot be working at a gun-making facility) must design the body, internals, all parts of a gun and it must be original and the best gun that actually works after 1 year wins production by a company. Problem is it has to work and be original. I think many people would participate, for if I had machining tools and lathes I would.

Electro guns will make things cheaper eventually. think about it. 25 years ago you couldnt get as much computing power as there is in a Angel in a 1975 computer. Aftetr a while, companies will find cheaper ways to produce the electro-pnematic parts. THats the expensive part. The actually electronics probably only costs the company less than 5% of the gun. Its a printed curcuit- it can be mass produced.. thousands a day. cheap.

[Shaft]

Electros can result in ROF's that exceed the ability of the shooter's finger (full auto modes). Barrels are quite accurate since barrel to paint matching was figured out. Many models are quite reliable.

Does fill and shell make a paintball more expensive? I have a feeling that the manufacturing dictates majority of the cost. Being able to produce the ball consistently can not be easy with the ancient method provided.

If anything, new formulations of shell and fill would probably allow for consistancy in the manufacturing process thus eliminating defects, bad batches etc. This would transcend into cheaper paint prices. Originally I thought that making guns that can handle inconsistant paint would be useful. Now I realize the benefit of paint formulation to provide cheaper to manufacture paint.

[Vegeta]

It is much like the 1800's. Here we are, with these guns, shooting pellets with black powder charges. Now this takes too much time to relead. SO instead of separatly loading your powder then your pellet down a barrel, they developed a cartridged bullet. This allows for the breach to be opened, and a new shell put in every time, with the old one taken out. The bullet is self contained, so now powder.

now paintball needs something like that. (im not saying we sould make cased pb's, bare with me) we need to balls rounder, with cheaper, better fill. harder paint would allow for wicked barrel systems (more extreme flatline anyone?) but would make the balls bruise/break skin easier.

So take it from there.

[AdrenalineMag]

Originally posted by rightsidefight
also why doesnt anyone try a ew type of gas system?i would like to see something like an oxygen tank wch as a byproduct fills a co2 compartment with you will get paid to epty fo co2 fills.that would be quit interesting

a little bit of 10th grade biology here, how would the oxygen just magically turn into co2? i think you forgot that in order for oxygen to change forms into co2 it has to undergo respiration, and last time i checked my mag wasnt breathing. so im not sure how your plan was gonna work, and im not trying to make you look bad, thats a good idea though... a gas tank the preforms respiration that would never end, just put a rat & a daisy in your tank... hmmm... just the problem of the pressure though, heh.
anyways, next for the future of the sport, you notice that wgp & wdp have the same gun every year, just a new model, its been a while since they came out with a new gun, yah theres dark angels & about 50 million other cocker versions etc. but agd just keeps on rolling out the innovations, hey tom, next on the drawboard for agd i'd like to see a low profile-fast feeding hopper like a warp feed hopper-without the warp feed. that would be pretty cool. i guess since we cant predict the future, cause my tarot cards havent said anything about paintball yet, well just have to sit back and enjoy the ride and see whats next for the paintball industry in major innovations!

[Vegeta]

A guy over at the Tippmann forums had an idea. He took a Shop-Vac and help it under a revvy. it emptied 180 rounds in 5 seconds. he worked that out to I belive 36 BPS. Now i dont know about mags, but Model 98's have a leftover blowback gas after a ball is fired. it normally just exits the gun. in a case of the RT Trigger being installed, it goes to a piston behind hte trigger which give it the reativeness. No what if this gas was used to blow balls DOWN the elbow? or what about a vacuum system that pulls hte balls into the chamber onto a screen. the air sucks the balls down the the screen, but they stop, then get fired.

[Muzikman]

As I mentioned to someone at the class/tour Friday night. I think paintball will eventually regress in technology. I raced R/C cards at the national level for about 8 years. When I started the cars where cheap and the electronics where crude (manual speed controls). As the technology progressed, the products got more expensive and people just starting out found it harder to keep up. Even racing at the nation level (kinda at the level of Am A in paintball) I had sponsors and I still found it hard to keep up, so I quit. I threw all my cars and junk into a few boxes and forgot about them. A couple years ago, I had thoughts about starting to race again. I picked up a few issues of R/C Car Action and followed the products for a few months. What I noticed was that the equipment that I had (about 5 or 6 years old) was just as advanced as the high end equipment on the market.
Was this because the stuff got so expensive and people realized that for the cost it wasn't worth it? Seeing what happened to R/C cars, I can see the same happening to Paintball.
There will be a day when we look at an Emag or Angel and say, danm, this gun has been around for 15 years and is still great or better than what is currently being produced.
I think ROF is the industies down fall, and I hope that paint prices do not go down. If they do, that will just make people want to shoot even more. If you can't hit somthing at 12bps, then you will want 20 bps, if you still can't hit it... where does it stop?

[rhetor22]

paintballs also need a good weight. If there is more mass it will have more momentum and therefore more range. I think if you "water down" the liquid in a paintball it will be harder to get that weight. I agree that ROF is taking a large portion of the time that a pb company would put towards other things. I think that Brass Eagle was thinking ahead with the rainmaker, don't use microchips to make the marker full auto, but incorporate it into other things so that the gun is better in other aspects. I play rec ball in the woods. When one of the guys that plays with me got a booyah, things changed. It sucks having a full auto gun, you can tell its just not the same. I shot it and it seems so fake. When you pull the trigger its like clicking a mouse, you don't feel the sear lift off the hammer (in the case of the stacked blowbacks) and you can't get a real feel for the gun. Electros are incredible in that they can fire at that speed, but you lose something by going electronic...

[Vegeta]

In my opinion.. a M98 with RT trigger is the most fun shootign a gun you will ever have. Its not like electro frames. you actually control it.. you still get that oldtime sear/trigger clcik n feel... yet our firing at tremedous speeds... And with the m98- you got a half pound blot slamming against that valve pin 14 times a second or more.. well it almost feels liek a real gun...

[joeyjoe367]

Originally posted by rhetor22
paintballs also need a good weight. If there is more mass it will have more momentum and therefore more range. I think if you "water down" the liquid in a paintball it will be harder to get that weight.

If you didn't notice, Water is pretty damn heavy. That's why Oil and a lot of other things will float in it. I doubt that the fill of the paintball is heavier than 8lb/gallon. Mabe it's a bit less viscous, but I highly doubt that it's heavier.

Anyway You don't want to be messing with the weight or dimentions of the paintball. If you don't know the story of how ol' school paintballers came up with the 300 fps limit here it is:

Budd Orr finds out that people are having their fingers broken from paintballs. He talks to a doctor and finds out how much pressure/energy it takes to break a finger, and computes it with the mass of a paintball (approx 1 gram). He does some math, and voila, he comes up with 300 fps.

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit vague, but you get the idea.

As far as the future of paintball? i don't see much except paintballs getting cheaper and higher quality 'guns being made more publicly available (ex: walmart, etc)