Paintball Guns
Paintball guns
A paintball guns, called markers, use a rapidly expanding gas to force a paintball through a barrel with a muzzle velocity of approximately 300 ft/s (91 m/s). Paintball guns come in a variety of shapes and styles. Some of them are small, powered by CO2 cartridges that require changing after 15 to 25 shots. Other are bigger, rifle-like, with larger air tanks and paintball storage "boxes". Paintball guns are composed of four parts - Body, Hopper, Tank and Barrel.
Marker body - The biggest difference between paintball guns bodies is the position of trigger and barrel. Trigger type is very important as it is what the player operates the marker with. High end paintball guns have electronic trigger frames with a variety of sensing methods. Some paintball guns use carefully set pneumatics to achieve a light and short trigger pull. A good trigger has an extremely short throw, with adjustable firing and travel limit stops.
Hopper - Hoppers, also known as loaders are used to hold paintballs for the paintball guns to fire. There are many types, but the basic ones are gravity feed, agitating, and force feed. Agitating and force feed hoppers give a higher possible rate of fire than the gravity feed ones. Gravity feed is the simplest and cheapest form of hopper. It consists of a large container and a feed tube. Paintballs roll down into the tube using gravity force, while agitating hoppers use propellers to agitate the paintballs. Force-feed hoppers are similar to agitated ones. They can use a propeller, be spring-loaded, or utilize a belt-fed system to force balls at an accelerated rate into a paintball gun. The difference between the two styles is that the design of the feed mechanism does not rely on gravity to move paintballs.
Barrel - A barrel directs the paintball and controls the release of the air pocket behind it. Several different bore sizes are available, and there are many different lengths and styles. Barrels are manufactured in three basic configurations: one piece, two piece, and three piece. Another important thing about the barrel is its length. Longer barrels generally make less noise than shorter ones, but they do not increase the range. An optimum paintball barrel length is 10-14 inches.
Barrel Blocking Devices - All players must use some sort of barrel blocking device on their paintball guns when they do not play actively. These devices generally take the form of a small bag, commonly known as a barrel sock or barrel cover, which covers the front end of the barrel and is held in place by an elastic cord looped around the paintball gun. Therefore the barrel sock catches any paintballs that may be accidentally fired. Modern paintball guns use a safety catch, where a button on the side of the marker is pressed to lock the firing trigger. However, even with the addition of a safety, players should always use a barrel blocking device.
Firing and trigger modes
Pump action - Pump action markers must be manually reloaded, just like a shotgun but only firing a single ball per trigger pull. This manual action is slower than other configurations, but is preferred by some players as a challenge to themselves to learn how to play with less rate of fire. Others have more satisfaction of playing with a pump.
Semi-auto - Semi-auto markers use a variety of designs to automatically cycle a bolt and load a new paintball into the chamber automatically, with each trigger pull. This frees the player from manually pumping the marker and increases the rate-of-fire.
Full-auto - Full-auto markers continually fire as long as the trigger is held down. Most electric paintball guns have this option, and if not, any of them be upgraded.
Bursting - Bursting allows multiple shots to be fired per trigger pull. Two and three shot burst modes are common, and some paintball guns have a programmable mode where the user can select the number of paintballs to be fired.
Ramping - Ramping shifts the mode of fire from semi-automatic to fully automatic as long as the trigger is pulled at a specified rate. Ramping can be difficult to detect, both because it may not be consistent or easily observable by a human. Ramping modes can also be hidden in the software, such that a marker will fire in legal semi-auto mode when being tested, but in an illegal ramping mode by the player.
Paintballs
The last matter concerns paintballs. A paintball is a round, thin-skinned gelatin capsule containing a colored liquid. Paintballs come in a rainbow of colors and when a player gets "tagged" with a paintball, the thin gelatin skin splits open and the liquid inside leaves a bright paint mark. The player is then eliminated from the game or for a specified period of time.
I believe that, both, a beginner and an intermediate player see no difference between various types of paintballs. Higher level players may yet distinguish from different brands. However, in practice, the most important thing for the paintball is to fit the marker you are using. It is worth to mention that there are paintballs of various sizes, depending on the barrel size. The type of paintball to be chosen depends on such parameters as the velocity of falling to gunlock, the kind of bolt used (gas injection to gunlock), and the rate of reloading. However, the best way is to try it and see for yourself. The is no better way than just to load a paintball marker and fire. You can also ask more experienced player who uses the same marker type about his opinion on different paintball types. He will know best the top ones. The paintball operators most recently provide several types of paintballs and you can choose most suitable ones for you. Experienced players buy paintballs themselves. Paintball clubs rather allow such situation and give possibility to use your own paintballs.
