Dustball?

[personman]

Haha, Cocaine ball..
Making paintball even moree addictive!

[skife]

simple solution that has already been designed by AGD and another company. put fins on the paintball. how cool would that be to have an "over under" gun, the top firing regular paint and the bottom firing sniper rounds.

theres a nonlethal weapon out right now that uses this technology.

check it out.
http://www.fnhusa.com/contents/ll_303.htm

AGD made that.

[LawnGnome7]

Solution: cookie dough filled paintballs, crunchy on the outside, gooey on the inside

And anyway America isn't fat enough :o

N.A.T.O.

why not just shoot m&ms

[brianlojeck]

I hate to bring logic into this...

The liquid-is-the-reason-we-don't-rifle-paintballs story pretty much hinges on two bits of evidence:

1: take a glass of ice water, spin it. the ice moves randomly and unpredictably, sometimes not at all.

2: spin an egg, stop it and release it. it starts spinning because of it's liquid center

There is a serious flaw in this idea, a paintball is MUCH higher viscosity then water or egg, and has such a low volume of liquid inside it that the liquid doesn't have the weight to pull off these tricks.

If you spin a paintball and stop it and release it, egg-style, it stays stopped. the liquid doesn't spin enough to effect the ball, and most likely spins along with the ball just fine.

The reason rifling doesn't work is paintballs are ROUND.

Spinning an arrow, a bullet, a spear, or a javlin makes them stable because they are long and pointed.

Spinning a baseball makes it go funky because it's round, while not spinning it makes it fly more straight.

IIRC, AGD made football shaped paintballs and spun them, and that didn't help much either because they were too light (which is the other issue).

i'd like to see the clouds of colored dust though, that would be cool..

[nato]

Hrrrm, just now do I notice that no one posted this vital information.

brianlojeck- I commend you for not assuming that people know about Spherical crazyness of a paintball.


I gotta go away for a while to punish myself for becomming so ignorant.

Farwell AO,

N.A.T.O.

[nato]

Ok, I'm back.

N.A.T.O.

[Altimas]

Sounds like a decent idea to me OTHER than the sheer cost of them...sheesh I hate to pay more than 40$ now for a case of paint I cant imagine paying 80$ for a case of Gold Bond Medicated Balls...

[sharpshooter1286]

paintballs are fine they way they are now. if they could be made better, different materials, then sure, but you don't need to fix what ain't broken. or in the case of paintballs, what will break.

[Jaguar45]

brianlojeck, you are not entirely correct. A round projectile does become more accurate when spun. That was the revolution from muskets to rifles, the reason the Civil War was so much bloodier than the War of Independence. Baseballs make funky curves when spun because of the stitching...that's why the stitching is there. Paintballs act more similarly to baseballs than a truly spherical object because they are not truly spherical; they are always larger around the seam and usually have at least some dimples.

In rifled paintball barrels, the shell starts spinning so much faster than the fill that the viscosity is overcome, much like when an object skids on the ground, going from static friction to kinetic friction, which is much less than the former. If you have ever used a rifled barrel and suffered a barrel break, you would notice that the following shots corkscrew significantly. That's because of the paint on the outside of the shell which, unlike the fill, DOES spin, but because it is asymmetricly weighted, the round does not go straight.

A way to make rifling in paintball effective would be to have sectioned paintballs. If, internally, the paintball were divided into 4 or more sections, the fill would spin with the shell regardless of orientation, and the paintball would gain the benefits of the rifling. However, manufacturing such a paintball would be far more difficult than making standard paintballs.

[brianlojeck]

Jaguar45 spake

>A round projectile does become more accurate...
>when spun. ... Civil War ... War of Independence...
>Baseballs make funky curves when spun because of the stitching...
>Paintballs act more similarly to baseballs...

Agreed, no argument on these points.

>In rifled paintball barrels, the shell starts spinning so much faster than the fill that the
>viscosity is overcome,

Unless you have the figures to show this (I honestly don't know the values for the viscosity of paintball fill, or the torque presented by a rifled barrel), I'll have to say we're both guessing at what happens.

>If you have ever used a rifled barrel and suffered a barrel break, you would notice that the >following shots corkscrew significantly. That's because of the paint on the outside of the >shell which, unlike the fill, DOES spin, but because it is asymmetricly weighted, the round >does not go straight.

THIS is where I have a real issue. An asymmetricly weighted paintball will corkscrew while spinning regardless of the viscocity of it's fill. Barrel breaks will cause funky flight no matter what. In fact, my unported smooth-honed KP barrel spirals a shot after a break every now and then.

Internal chambers may help get the fill spinning, but so what? unless their was no airspace whatsoever inside the ball it would still fly off-course when spun because it would be unbalanced.

and even if they were perfectly filled and round and smooth and spinning with all the fill in perfect motion, would that help? I've read of AGD experiments using a high-speed rotating paintgun (3000RPM?) and perfect circle paintballs, and the ultimate result was it didn't help because of the light weight of the ball. (although i welcome correction if I'm mis-remembering this)

[Hasty8]

how about some kind of material that liquidates when it gets pressure applied to it, but is solid when left alone? That way, solid in the air, but liquid on impact.

Not only is this complicated but also expensive as all hack. Instead of having a case of 2000 cost me $100 the price would undoubtely multiply by a factor of ten.

As for the overall idea of a "chalk" filled ball keep one thing in mind. Solid's are denser than liquid. As such they will require more propellant than the liquid filled variety and also, they will inherantly exhert more inetic energy upon impact.

More sting is not a good thing.

I made a rhyme!

[Jaguar45]

>Unless you have the figures to show this (I honestly don't know the values for the viscosity of >paintball fill, or the torque presented by a rifled barrel), I'll have to say we're both guessing at >what happens.

The whole problem with spinning paintballs is the liquid. That is the reason AGD had to get the shell's spin to 3000(30000? I can't remember the exact number either) rpm...with the shell going any slower, it doesn't have the rotational energy to move the fill significantly. It was only when the shell was moving so fast that it could get the fill to move with any effective rotational speed.

>unless their was no airspace whatsoever inside the ball it would still fly off-course when spun >because it would be unbalanced

Not so much as you might think. The difference in density of the air and paint would cause the air to move towards the center of the paintball and the paint to the outside, minimizing the effects of any air inside the shell. The paintball would be a mini-centrifuge.

>the ultimate result was it didn't help because of the light weight of the ball

I can't recall if it did help, but couldn't be translated to normal paintballs, or if it didn't help to begin with. I'd have to read it over again, too.

[MrWallen]

Not only is this complicated but also expensive as all hack. Instead of having a case of 2000 cost me $100 the price would undoubtely multiply by a factor of ten.

As for the overall idea of a "chalk" filled ball keep one thing in mind. Solid's are denser than liquid. As such they will require more propellant than the liquid filled variety and also, they will inherantly exhert more inetic energy upon impact.

More sting is not a good thing.

I made a rhyme!

Well, you get the exact opposite effect with cornstarch and water, which I don't think is too expensive.

[Hasty8]

Well, you get the exact opposite effect with cornstarch and water, which I don't think is too expensive.

I'm not sure I understand your point here. Please elaborate.

[MrWallen]

Well, if you mix cornstarch and water together, it's a liquid, unless you apply pressure to it, then it turns solid. Pretty cool actually.
I was just thinking if there were some way to create a substance that had the opposite properties (solid normally but liquid under pressure) then you could have paintballs with all the aerodynamic properties of a solid object but would liquidate on impact so as not to cause too much harm to the person being hit.