Dustball?

[Hasty8]

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.

I got it now but I think my initial point still stands. To make a paintball that would do this would likely be hideously cost prohibitive.

I have no clue as to the physics of it.

[cybershark]

the anti-cornstarch ball still doesn't work

so lets just say you make your reverse cornstarch ball...it liquifies when pressured and solidifies when resting...think about what happens while you fire the ball...it's gonna get popped in the back with a hefty punch of air...it'll liquify...the recovery to rest isn't gonna happen until the ball is pretty much at full speed or even after it's already outta the gun...so now you're gonna have a ball with a liquid core and all the strange, possibly swirling currents, inside it solidifying...as it does this it's gonna transfer all those fun currents into rotations throughout the now mostly solid ball...I'd wager that this will cause it to wobble even more than current liquid fills...

with weight being the main factor in getting these things accurately downrange we're kinda limited...up the weight and keep the range...now you've got flesh wounds...

It seems to me that the best way to do it would be to make the ammo smaller (like 40cal blowgun stuff)...then you could increase fill density a lot to still keep the same impact pressure...it's just too bad we're all so stuck on .68 ammo...frankly airsoft guns just feel cheap and impotent to me after so many years of catapulting these 68cal cannonballs at people...plus it's hard to get a quarter sized mark outta one...and hard to notice a dime sized hit....

basically we can get atleast a little more accuracy and/or range, but I don't think we'll ever be willing to pay the price...or the price per ball...

round isn't the problem...it's size, impact pressure, and POSSIBLY density...my .177 cal BB gun shot nice and straight...but with a solid (copper) BB it'd make a nice hole in a soda can at 300fps...and even if that wasn't a problem...it'd leave a whopping drop of paint on the target

[Lyshk0]

Well......all the cornstarch and water in the world wont change the fact that what you are suggesting is a physical impossibility. You are proposing that paintballs should be filled with a substance that, while at rest will reamin solid, yet on impact liquify. I'm ASSUMING that you mean for this to happen in the opposite way of cornstach/water, i.e. compression of a solid substance that would transition into a liquid. One of the basic laws of physics is that solids are more dense than liquids. By adding pressure to a solid, you are only going to succeed in making it stay solid....unless you use jello.......but i think thats a little too much like shooting cookie dough or m&ms for me....The best way to do as you are saying would be to have a brittle, but solid exterior with a liquid fill so as the solid will shatter, releasing the liquid (ex. a paintball. The problem with that is that if spun, the liquid and gasseous fill will react in un-predictable ways. The simple solution to THAT problem is having a pure liquid center in the brittle, solid shell. But the problem with THAT is that liquids, by nature, do not compress. Thus, the shell would not break as consistently......Oh dear....I've gone and typed my logic into a circle.....owell, i was bored and decided to throw in my 2 cents.....

BTW, anyone got a RT ULE Custom for sale yet?????????

I know i know....wrong forum

cyaz

[MrWallen]

Hmm, so all solids all denser than their liquid counter-parts, eh? Well, I guess that means that water and ice can't exit, oh well.

[Lyshk0]

sorry...i forgot to say that solids and liquids at the same temperature....
but if u can make a paintball that can shoot frozen and hit liquid that would be awesome.....

[MrWallen]

I'm thinking someone needs to create a refrigerated hopper, ASAP.

[ScatterPlot]

Wow, I can't beleive I have missed this thread for so long. Anyway, what Lyshk0 said is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure you're not "freezing" cornstarch and water when you compress it. It doesn't turn into an actual solid at that point, I don't think. What happens there is something else, which I'm gonna do some more research on here in a second.
Anyway, what about something like crackers? Kinda like those pink ones that have lots of sugar you can get at gas stations and grocery stores as a snack... the name escapes me at the moment. Something light and porous that could be filled with paint, or left alone to turn to powder. Hey, you wouldn't even need a shell with a crackerball... :) Anyway even if the effects weren't anything to write home about then it would still be kinda cool... like a dimpled paintball or something.

[MrWallen]

You talking about wafers? Those things are good, that's an interesting idea too...

[justjoshin590]

how about this: take a few small airsoft paintballs, and put them inside of a .68 paintball, it would be a solid, but still burst as a liquid, so rifled barrels would be very efective
possible problems: well it would be damned expensive, but a better process could be made, after all your basically making a lot of paintballs for every 1
the exterior of it could be dimpled, due to the solid inerds, thus making it very inacurate

i personally like the idea of a multi chambered paintball best, so it would still be liquid fill, but the different chambers would make the liquid spin

[hitech]

Shooting a solid paintball with rifiling does NOT improve accuracy. Tom tried it (nylon .68 cal balls that weight the same as paintballs).

It's vortex shedding that kills the accuracy. Want to improve accuracy? Devise a way to eliminate that.

[Miscue]

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..

This is not true. It is inaccurate because it is light and the shape has poor aerodynamic properties - as a blunt object.

Ball ammo and cannon balls benefit from rifling. It's not to stabilize it, since it is symmetrical after all - but to keep it spinning in a consistent direction.

Rifling doesn't work on paintballs because it's trying to correct a problem that isn't there - it's a misapplication of a firearms principle.

[justjoshin590]

Shooting a solid paintball with rifiling does NOT improve accuracy. Tom tried it (nylon .68 cal balls that weight the same as paintballs).

It's vortex shedding that kills the accuracy. Want to improve accuracy? Devise a way to eliminate that.

vortex shedding?

[hitech]

vortex shedding?

Read this.

[justjoshin590]

how about elongated paintballs, the same width but twice as long and ronded at the end, or just like the less than lethal launcher that agd made for fn

http://www.fnhusa.com/contents/ll_303.htm

just add fins to the paintballs, it would require clip fed markers, but the people that would need the great range increase would mainly play milsim

[wolfwood_is_here]

Rifling doesn't work on paintballs because it's trying to correct a problem that isn't there - it's a misapplication of a firearms principle.

So you are basically saying that because of the difference of paintballs and bullets in both physical construction and properties in how they react to stress makes rifling not worth it?

So you would have to change the very nature of paintballs in order to even make a feasable argument for a rifled barrel?

That makes sense, and why many people reccommend smooth, polished internals for paintball barrels, because it accomodates for the paintball like a rifled barrel would for a bullet.