Is paintball better than airsoft?

[sammynac99]

Originally Posted by FirestormX

I disagree on that part, assuming you're talking about the gun/marker. Airsoft gearboxes are based on a 20 year old design, and all we really have is a company in Japan making guns for the Japanese market, and a bunch of Chinese companies cloning that tech. There's no real steps forward.

I have this discussion with a chairsofting coworker sometimes, who's been playing paintball for 20+ years, and he talks about how annoying it is to look at airsoft gear. He's watched the evolution of paintball over the past two decades, meanwhile airsoft is barely moving. He'll talk about how he'll listen to an episode of airsoftology, and when they say something like "hey, did you see this new thing that might be coming out? It's pretty exciting", and he wants to yell at them "yeah, it's called a such-and-such. The technology has been around since the 80s", or something.

The G&G PDW came out, with its adjustable velocity, and that's considered a selling point. You buy a $400 gun, and not only is it accepted that something will break within a few games, but it's expected. People are debating and explaining things about air compression, barrel diameter, and whatever - meanwhile paintballers have gone over all that a decade ago. (That was a bad example, but you get the point)

His analogy is that it's like airsoft and paintball came up together, and paintball got more popular, and thus had a bigger player base, was more profitable for manufacturers, etc. So a lot of the technology grew through paintball. The same stuff that could be applied to airsoft with no problem, but it's like airsoft manufacturers are too proud to glance over at what paintball is doing, so they either reinvent the wheel (rarely), or just reproduce a v2 gearbox over and over.

So in that sense, paintball is much better. Manufacturers are improving their guns. New ideas and designs are coming out every few years. Paintball is continually innovating and evolving.

Airsoft is relatively stagnant.

This is a very good point, but also keep in mind the same thing with copying designs has happened in paintball, you have all sorts of clones of tippmans and spyders flooding the paintball market, and its because its a reliable design, many starter airsoft guns use a V2 gearbox and MOST are M4's, this is the same with paintball having mostly Tippmanns or spyders just starting to play.

i also see however that there is a large disparity between advancement. The thing that could truly make Airsoft More interesting would be a incorporation of paintball technology into airsoft. could you imagine first strike airsoft rounds? the range on AEG's already rocks but imagine a TM VSR-10 Shooting 425 with .43 gram First strike Pellets. could you imagine the possibilities of that, 300+yard Range, Full use of long range scopes/optics.

Or Possibly having a GBB with a pneumatic firing mechanism giving you a 1-2-3-4-5-full auto round firing function with the flip of a switch. Using a regulator and hi pressure air stored in the stock in a small tank like the milsigs.

adjustable regulators and boards to give insane rates of fire with hi pressure air. I feel that high pressure air is the future of airsoft and paintball. Very little firing inconsistencies, high discharge rate, easy to refill and can be compact.

[Hectic]

HPA is also the PAST of airsoft it evolved in a different direction probably to maintain realism in the looks of the guns, yes the gear box ir relatively unchanged in 20 years but there isnt really much room for improvement on the disign of the gearbox and the improvements have been made by either aftermarket parts or v3 boxes and so on.
I do agree tha tthe hpa systems for airsoft wer awesome and id like to see them still being made (reminisses about the YE MP5's) but i dont think airsofters for the most part want to carry tanks on ytheir backs with remote lines running out of their guns so the new trend is going towards the GBBR's for even more realism trust me if i coud pic up a YE MP5SD6 id be all over it and people would all be like man thats awesome especially the newbies and all the oldschoolers would be like pft been there done that got an AEG never looked back.
I even almost picked up one of thse RAP4's back in the day the m4 one mag fed that you could swap the barrel and load the bb's into painball sized shells and have a gas/hpa powered "shell" ejecting m4 to use both for AS and PB but in the end decided to just stick with AEG's till the GBBR's got all the bugs worked out.
Some interesting info on "classic as" http://www.thefullwiki.org/Classic_airsoft
my all time fave the YE MP5's ( i think i alrdy posted this link) Airsoft: Gas YE-MP5 Underwater - Available in HD - YouTube
amd the i never caught on but could have prolly been quite awesome rap4 http://www.rap4.com/paintball/os/rap...c-261_409.html
and as we see everything old becomes new again amd it may only be a matter of time befor we see "escort" type systems being produced again who knows, i know id buy one or ten lol

And 425fps with .43g bb's thats like 3.61 joules not too many folks wanna get hit with that and there are some snipers that do run 600fps and that is 410fps with .43's so thats not unheard of just not too many snipers are certified/trusted with lvl4 and not too many fields allow for the 200ft meds needed for that fps and to top it off even with the best of hopup systems maintaining a stable flight of such a light projectile at those levles is dificult even over 500fps on .20 like my gun (513fps on .20 or 350 fps on .43) is a lil toutchy to say the least 500-550 fps is about max you wanna go to with .20's to get a good stable flight and at those 500+ powers you baisicly run .36-.43 to lowwer velocities and create a more stable flight and carry more energy out to range to make sniping viable otherwise you may as well run a 400fps aeg with helacial gears and a sorbo pad youd be almost as quiet and still have roughly the same effective range as a 450fps bolt action firing the same .30 or .36 bb's i run .36-.40 with my 512fps on .20's and have an effective range of about 300-400feet depending on conditions like weather/ wind and line of sight 300 is mostly the max 400 is shooting at static targets it takes about 3-4 secconds for the bb to travel the 400ft so shotin at people at those ranges isnt a great idea by the time the shot gets there theis teeth are where their cheas was when you pulled the trigger not verry safe IMO

[sammynac99]

Originally Posted by Hectic

HPA is also the PAST of airsoft it evolved in a different direction probably to maintain realism in the looks of the guns, yes the gear box ir relatively unchanged in 20 years but there isnt really much room for improvement on the disign of the gearbox and the improvements have been made by either aftermarket parts or v3 boxes and so on.
I do agree tha tthe hpa systems for airsoft wer awesome and id like to see them still being made (reminisses about the YE MP5's) but i dont think airsofters for the most part want to carry tanks on ytheir backs with remote lines running out of their guns so the new trend is going towards the GBBR's for even more realism trust me if i coud pic up a YE MP5SD6 id be all over it and people would all be like man thats awesome especially the newbies and all the oldschoolers would be like pft been there done that got an AEG never looked back.
I even almost picked up one of thse RAP4's back in the day the m4 one mag fed that you could swap the barrel and load the bb's into painball sized shells and have a gas/hpa powered "shell" ejecting m4 to use both for AS and PB but in the end decided to just stick with AEG's till the GBBR's got all the bugs worked out.
Some interesting info on "classic as" http://www.thefullwiki.org/Classic_airsoft
my all time fave the YE MP5's ( i think i alrdy posted this link) Airsoft: Gas YE-MP5 Underwater - Available in HD - YouTube
amd the i never caught on but could have prolly been quite awesome rap4 http://www.rap4.com/paintball/os/rap...c-261_409.html
and as we see everything old becomes new again amd it may only be a matter of time befor we see "escort" type systems being produced again who knows, i know id buy one or ten lol

And 425fps with .43g bb's thats like 3.61 joules not too many folks wanna get hit with that and there are some snipers that do run 600fps and that is 410fps with .43's so thats not unheard of just not too many snipers are certified/trusted with lvl4 and not too many fields allow for the 200ft meds needed for that fps and to top it off even with the best of hopup systems maintaining a stable flight of such a light projectile at those levles is dificult even over 500fps on .20 like my gun (513fps on .20 or 350 fps on .43) is a lil toutchy to say the least 500-550 fps is about max you wanna go to with .20's to get a good stable flight and at those 500+ powers you baisicly run .36-.43 to lowwer velocities and create a more stable flight and carry more energy out to range to make sniping viable otherwise you may as well run a 400fps aeg with helacial gears and a sorbo pad youd be almost as quiet and still have roughly the same effective range as a 450fps bolt action firing the same .30 or .36 bb's i run .36-.40 with my 512fps on .20's and have an effective range of about 300-400feet depending on conditions like weather/ wind and line of sight 300 is mostly the max 400 is shooting at static targets it takes about 3-4 secconds for the bb to travel the 400ft so shotin at people at those ranges isnt a great idea by the time the shot gets there theis teeth are where their cheas was when you pulled the trigger not verry safe IMO

i'm saying lets push the design limits of these things! a 6 mm bb with fins and a rifled barrel could revolutionize the range and accuracy of airsoft as it did with paintball.

[Hectic]

Originally Posted by sammynac99

i'm saying lets push the design limits of these things! a 6 mm bb with fins and a rifled barrel could revolutionize the range and accuracy of airsoft as it did with paintball.

check the Rap 4 site closely in teh link i provided no "rifling" in the barrel i dont think but the fins on the rap 4 "not bb's" are tilted to give the spiraling effect,
next thing the did was release a hop up version of their airsot barrel then an adjustable hop up version because it is more effective then the finned projectile. it works well for PB cause well they cant really use hop up without breakin paint filled projectiles in their guns so the issues outweigh the benifates, they have tryed to impose a "hop up" like effect on painballs for years with different methods of gas flow and such but in the end it wasnt all that effective like hop up is to airsoft
i think teh one odd thing they did is what turns folks off is that their barrels are tapered from 8mm somethin down to 6.05ish

[Metalsynth]

Is paintball better than airsoft?

Yes.

Never looked or conceived the idea of going back.

[FirestormX]

Originally Posted by Hectic

yes the gear box ir relatively unchanged in 20 years but there isnt really much room for improvement on the disign of the gearbox and the improvements have been made by either aftermarket parts or v3 boxes and so on.

Why should I have to buy an aftermarket gear box shell and put a little bit of padding at the front of the shell where the piston hits it, just so I can run a stronger spring without fear of the piston or shell exploding on impact when I pull the trigger?
Why isn't there a little screw I can turn to alter the spring tension, so that I don't have to change the spring?
Why do I need to change my gears or reshim them when I buy my gun?
Why don't I have a board that lets me adjust the rate of fire/burst?
Why am I afraid that the gearbox will explode when I open it, and have to delicately put it all back together?

Some of these are little things, that you would hope proper quality control, and good materials would fix. We play a game where we accept and expect that we're spending several hundred dollars on a gun, that has incredibly poor internals.
We're scared to open our internals, because we're afraid we can't put them back together.
We make serious suggestions like "well if you're going to be playing a lot of indoor and outdoor games, you may as well just buy a second lower for your M4, because it's easier to just swap the lower, than open up your gearbox and swap an M90 spring with an M120".

We don't want this, but it's all that we're offered.

Paintball vs airsoft is like the PC vs apple (respectively) in the aspect of hardware.

Saying "there's three gears in your gearbox. You can't do much about needing to keep them aligned" is like saying "the Retina display is attached to your macbook. You can't 'just replace the display'". Stystema and ICS have had split gearboxes/quick swap cylinders for years now, where you don't need to go near the gears if you wanted to change the springs, and so far the Katana is the only thing coming close to having something similar. There's a handful of gearbox models that allow you to adjust the spring without opening the gearbox.

The autococker (<3 it) is a "complicated" mechanism. But people didn't sit around and say "well, it works, and there's not much you can do about it. If your cycle timing is off, just sit there for a few hours and get it working again". They went off and designed new mechanisms.

Edit: there's also a problem with marking. Seeing one of Jimski's posts has reminded me that there's still no fucking sticky peanut butter projectiles. Why do you people put up with this lack of sticky peanut butter?!

[Deadpool]

Originally Posted by Metalsynth

Is paintball better than airsoft?

Yes.

Never looked or conceived the idea of going back.

Not sure, But I think you, of all people I know, mean no.

Just sayin'.

[Hectic]

there are actually 6mm paint balls but they only work in guns without hop up or they wind up busting in the gun, an ddont expect the "gucci" airsofters to let you shoot paint at their baby puke i mean multicam and yes i agree the quick change spring option is one thing that airsoft needs to become standard, even the one where ther is just a cap at the rear of the gearbox would be fine, no need foir fancy two peice designs just a lil redisign is all that would be needed but if that is an important feature for you then just be sure to buy guns with that feature, to me tho it would be nice its not all that important, having a long ass m16 or even an m4 with a longish barrel just doesnt work for me in CQB anyhow so a seccond gun is almost a givin, i personnaly have never opened up a new gun to reshim or what have you and even my first JG m4 went for a long ass time befor the gearbox cracked in the cold.most guns dont need to be reshimed out of the box, of course the OCD types among us will tell you that they can shim it beter and they likely can but its not gonna make that huge of a difference on longevity as justr buying a higer end gun is gonna make, JG's at the time i got mine wer branded as being poorly shimmed and overgreased but mine worked fine outta the box and lasted years befor it busted fro mtoo much dry fire in the cold at 400fps. mofset to adjust rate of fire and burst settings and such are relatively new to airsoft just lkie lipo is and as more n more folks start to use lipo and more n more guns come with such cramped space that lipo is the only option more n more guns will start to come with mofset out of the box.
also keeping in mind comparing a Systema with a JG/TM/VFC or whatever other kind of AEG is also back to the Microsoft/Apple comparison obviously you are gonna get alot more for two g's then yer gonna get for three hundred bucks lol

[Aj619]

Originally Posted by Hectic

it works well for PB cause well they cant really use hop up without breakin paint filled projectiles in their guns so the issues outweigh the benifates

What about the apex which works exactly like a hop up system except for it puts back spin on the ball at the end of the barrel and if using woodsball paint as opposed to tourny grade paint you will have little to no barrel breaks as tourny paint is much more brittle than woodsball paint

In fact the apex has been used by woodsball players for years they even sell it in a package including apex barrel and tip

also all those companies tying to use gas or the bolt to give the ball back spin they're research and products have been unfounded in fact on a fourm called tech pb there is a section called punk works where they test the legitimacy of said claims

Go check it out if you want it's quite interesting and I wish we had something like that on here

not sure if anyone mentioned this but there is also First strike rounds for paintball which put's a stabilizing spin on the paintball which have a bullet shape to them

[FirestormX]

Not 6mm paint bbs, sticky peanut butter!
That was more a joke, anyway.

The point is that after 20 years, you'd think there would at least one competing gearbox design, or that companies would at least put some work into ironing things out and working on quality control.

I don't want to sound like I'm saying "boycott airsoft! Screw the cloning Chinese for their shotty (ha) QC on my gun! Let's get a petition started for airsoft manufacturers to develop something better!"
I'm just saying that the progression of airsoft is fairly non-existant, and this can be shown by it growing up alongside paintball, which is essentially the same thing, except that it uses gases to propel its heavier projectiles, instead of a motor to wind a piston.

If I were a parent, and I had two sons, and one day I walked in on the two of them drawing. One was drawing circles, and showed it to me all excited, saying "look what I drew!". He had coloured the circles in, but a lot of the time the circles weren't perfect circles, and sometimes the colours would stray outside the lines. Then I look over at the other, and he's still hunched over his drawing. I walk over and see that he's drawing a beautiful landscape, with vibrant colours and amazing detail.
I would turn to the first kid, and yell "YOU'RE 20 YEARS OLD. FFS. YOU'VE BEEN DRAWING CIRCLES SINCE YOU WERE 3. AT THE VERY LEAST, YOU COULD HAVE LEARNED TO COLOUR INSIDE THE LINES. LOOK AT YOUR BROTHER."
And then I would shame that first child, and make the second child my prize. When people asked how many children I had, I would proudly say "I have two children", and the first child would smile. But then I would point to the second child and continue "This boy right here is as good as two children!", and the first child would go be sad, and hang out with his group of friends that drew even crappier circles, and praised his circles with things like "well, you can either draw a circle, or a square, and a circle is more perfect than a square".

I ramble too much.

[Hectic]

Lmao that was funny.
I see what u are sayin but alot the qc issues u speak of are not relevant when you buy a TM its just the clusterfuck of china clones and american rebranded china clones like echo1 that have the issues and echo1 are jg's bdought to the us opened up reshimed regrease baisicly given a good qc process then sold under the echo1 name at least that what the wer a few years back not sure if they have started manufatcuring but id imagine they still just rebrand china clone stuff. Buy a tm open it up and see they are almost always percectly shimmed and greassd and run around 280fps springs so they are reliable and last a long ass time. 400fps isnt needed and the original desing wasnt intended to run that high its clone stuff from china for the us and eu market whers faster and harder is considered the bemchmark for beter that causez reliability issues and such. If we all ran tms at 300fps ish the field would be equal and noone would have a need for 400fps but "all the other kids are doin it" type thinking means we all gotta have 400fps ish guns and means we all gotta deal with the reliability issues that come along with ghe high fps setups.
I had stock tm mp5 back in the day thag performed just as good as my stock jg m4 with much better externals on the tm. Just it couldnt keep up with all the 400fps guns that folks built up outta tm base guns. It out shot almost every clone tho as far as accuracy just lacked a lil in range do to the 100+fps difference

[FirestormX]

Yeah, TM is pretty much the top of the line, but only because of their quality control. But you shouldn't say "you have to spend twice as much on a TM than you would on that JG, AND you have to put up with having a plastic body". In 20 years, another company should have come along and established itself for the non-Japanese markets.

KSC has done this for gas blowback, with their KWA distribution in North America, but it hasn't really caught on with their KWA AEGs. At least not in Canada.

You're right, if we all ran TMs at their intended FPS, then all would be great with their gear. But we don't have the laws that Japan has in place, so we increase the velocity for better performance (not saying faster always equals better, but you know what I mean). If this were nearly any other industry, if the Japanese guns can't keep up then some other company would have come along to cater to the North American and EU markets.

In our case, no one has stepped up, AND it's expensive (and relatively rare, compared to clones) to get your hands on a TM, so most people are running around with a crappy V2 clone in their hand.

[Hectic]

Agreed so we are all left with the option we almost all take buy a full metal clone for half the price of a tm and put the difference of cost toward reshiming beter pistons and gearsets better hop ups and such. Just the nature of the game for us i spose. Yes it would be great if TM would start makin full metal 350-400fps guns for export only (tho i think their laws forbid them from doing so) or have a factory in the us or in europe to make them but they have all the market they alrdy need so we are of little concern to them.
Plus there are a host of aftermarket metal bodies gearbox parts and all thjngs airsoft to cater to those who dont have such laws to obide by that they may be too late to even consider doing it cause folks are set on the buy it and rebuild it trend alrdy.
Lets keep in mind tho that the guns commin out of china are 10 times beter today quality wise then the wer 5-10 years ago. Companiez like JG and CYMA are as of late producing quite good clones with full metal bodies out of the box. There are others i just havsnt handled any of em to say one way or another how good or bad they are but the cyma mp5 i had back in the day was subpar compared to the mp5k ive been lookin at and the jg/echo1 m4 i just picked up has a much beter plastic body and much quieter gearbox then the first jg m4 (my first aeg) that i got in 2007.
So things (in the clone world) are getting alot beter with time as they refine tbeir manufacturing and qc processes and materials get beter.
Of course itll be a long ass time befor a tm or a clone will have the tech that goes into a sytema but it may happen one day maybe our grandkids will see it lmao.

[FirestormX]

Originally Posted by Hectic

Just the nature of the game for us i spose

Well, it's the nature of airsoft. Not necessarily the nature of the shoot-things-at-other-people game.

On the topic of Systema clones, Brian made some good points along the lines of (but not exactly) how we as airsofters need to support things like the A&K PTW clone, in order to show manufacturers that we WANT them to get better.

[Hectic]

Yes i read a bit about the ptw clones i thought someone was spose to bring em in but didnt see anything about them bein here yet. I actually thought there was more then ome company talkin about makin a PTW edit CTW is the other ptw clone thingy. Id definately buy one so long as they are at least as good as a regular aeg (hopefully beter) and not 2 grand lol.
Hopefully sub 800 bucks with 100% systema compatability so when/if somethin fails it can be replaced with some overly priced systema parts lol.