My Nova N4 review

[Vegabond]

Nova N4 Odin Review:

The Nova N4 Odin is Nova’s latest offering. Starting at $199, this is meant to be a budget marker. That said, if initial experiences with the marker stay consistent, one could easily have an excellent marker on their hands suitable for novice or experienced players as well. Nova seems to have a mixed record with its markers so far with players either having issues with the N1/N3 series of markers, or just loving them.

Lets go over the basics:

• Operates at 90-100 PSI
• Takes cocker threaded barrels
• Metel upper, nylon lower
• Slide trigger
• Closed Bolt System
• Poly clamping feed neck stock
• 45 style grips
• All Pneumatic Operating System

At the starting point of $199 without barrel or $229 with, you have a basic marker that should serve you well. With an operating pressure of 90-100 psi, the marker should be very efficient on air and gentle on paint. The slide trigger feels nice, but one needs to take care to complete a full trigger pull and release. There are rumors of an all metal lower being offered, but there is nothing wrong with the nylon lower. The closed bolt system is a proven choice, and the “recoil” impulse can be felt, but does not cause any noticeable sway or kick. Finally, it takes cocker threaded barrels, so one can save a tad bit of money if you already have cocker barrels about. As purchased, I opted to forgo the barrel and went ahead and had them upgrade the ASA to the on/off version and got the metal clamping feedneck.

My personal time spent with the marker at Fulda Gap was limited, but it performed flawlessly. Other then breaking a ball during chrono (which could have been a variety of causes), the marker had no further issues in my hands for about a quarter of the day on Saturday, I then loaned it to a teammate who was impressed with it and also reported no issues. Sunday, I loaned it out to another teammate who largely plays Magfed with first strike rounds. He proceeded to use it all day, and was very happy with its performance and reported no issues whatsoever.

Overall, the marker feels a lot like an autococker. It isn’t going to win awards for rate of fire, but it keeps up nicely with an agitated hopper attached and should keep any rec ball player happy or anyone who doesn’t see the need to throw 20 bps downrange. With my Fibur-X8 CF barrel attached, it was very accurate for roundball. A word of caution here, per Nova, the marker should be used with a normal agitation hopper, nothing that force feeds the balls.

To be honest, there are not really any negatives to the marker. It sits at an attractive price point. Maintenance should be a breeze and per Nova one could clean it under water as it is entirely all Pneumatic. It points well, is light weight, and accurate. If I had any gripes, I wish they would have bumped it to $250 and included the metal feedneck and on/off ASA as standard. Along with a quick remove method for the shroud instead of needing to use a hex key. It would have been nice to have seen some of the cool body artwork Nova offers on its other markers available for the N4 but it is a budget marker, though a choice of solid colors would have been nice. As you can see from my photo, the grips do retain paint pretty well, so getting them back to factory clean is going to take some scrubbing. Obviously long-term usage will give us more data on the reliability of the N4, but initial use seem promising. After market support will likely be limited, but so far this seems like a good choice for a new player or an experienced players wanting a basic, reliable, and accurate marker they can use. Personally, I would like to see Nova move into the magfed game and I feel like the N4 would be an excellent platform for that (grease gun anyone?). I look forward to seeing what else Nova offers for the N4 but I think they have a winner and look forward to seeing more on the field.

[Cdn_Cuda]

Great write up! Very tempting to grab one of these when I order my N3 barrel parts.

[glaman5266]

Wait- it has a SLIDE trigger? That sounds nice.

I'm not familiar with the barrel you used. Does that take inserts or is that just a straight bore? I'm curious about how sensitive these are with bore sizing, since one of the other Novas (N1 maybe?) seems to be particular about it.

[Vegabond]

Deadlywinds Carbon Fiber barrel, takes the XL freak inserts. Nova sells their own version but I already had this so didn't see a reason to pick up another barrell. Seems to work well and the guy I loaned it to sunday used a different set up with different inserts. Marker didn't seem to care what was attached to it.

[ChoSanJuan]

You can use pretty much ANY Cocker barrel. The only issue is that since it's closed bolt, you neeeeeed to size your bore properly. Rollouts are the lightest issue. With the shuttle speed of the bolt resetting, if the balls are over-bored, it'll smack the ball down your barrel and when the firing stage of the trigger pull happens, it'll just puff around it and your ball will only go like 5-10 feet in front of you. Not a good time.

I used a Freak and an Acculock, both under-bored. No paint breaks, but even then, I still had issues with lame shots with the quality of paint that was out of round.

[BrickHaus]

I heard a pretty ugly review from a friend who has one. I haven't seen his experience posted publicallly, but I'll be holding off on an n4 til he tells me otherwise.

[Myrkul]

I had two unforgivable issues with my N1.

The first issue was the "O" Ring durometer. I have no idea why nova used 50 durometer "O" Rings, but they were too soft and failed to hold the barrel collar in place. Cycling was wildly inconsistent as a result. I swapped to 70 durometer and the problem cleared up. When I called nova about it.... They straight up told me that I was right. They said they hadn't done any testing in different playing conditions, and a stiffer "O" Ring cleans up the cycling issues. They promised to update all future Nova's with the stiffer "O" Ring, but I highly doubt they actually did. I can't imagine the cost savings between 50 durometer and 70 durometer was significant, so I'm just left scratching my head as to why this was ever even a problem in the first place.

The second issue, was my N1 just could not handle the small local field paint. I do understand that 0.675 is crazy small, but that's what the local field has and it's FPO. Moving to a larger insert did not fix the issue. Switching out loaders did not fix the issue. Nothing worked. It would either skip shots and chop with a gravity, double feed or stack clip with an electronic loader. It was partially rollback, partially blowback up the feedneck, partially stack clipping, just over all the worst possible breach system I've come across. Sure it might have worked better with larger paint, but we can't shoot that at the local field without sneaking it in, so the gun was pretty much just dead in the water. I can't help but feel like it would have worked better with some kind of detent system in place, but once again, I was just left scratching my head as to why this wasn't included in the first place.

[Jonnydread]

Myrkul You have perfectly described my experience with the N1. I want to love it so badly...

[Apaches]

We actually did change the barrel collar o-ring on all of the models after this conversation, just made sense and it worked. As far as the detent goes we tried a breach system that had detents in it but for some reason it chopped consistently so the idea was scrapped. First I've actually ever heard of the paint issue and wish I had heard earlier, never really had an issue like this occur. We've been to pretty much 90% of all the east coast major scenarios games this year and never had an issue. What type of field paint was it if you don't mind me asking.

[Cyberpyr8]

I saw that someone did print a 3D replacement for the shroud. It was over on the Nova group on FB. I am not crazy about the N4 shroud. It needs to go all the way or not at all. (Do or do not, there is no try). It makes it look really clean. But even with that and the low price, I doubt I will sell of my Emeks for a N4. They need to just get one of their markers really running and working great. But they seem more concerned with what's next. I had high hopes for the N4 but it's not something I can recommend to people wanting to get in. With used Emeks running around the $200 mark, it's too easy to tell someone to get one of those and not worry they're going to hate it.

[ChoSanJuan]

Yeah, that was me. I was all about saying "Is it an Odin? Is it a trayless Ion?" It was pretty cool that they offered to make a new aluminum shroud for it in the key of what I modeled up. Little do they know, that's just the beginning and was the base measurements of other shrouds and accessories I'll be printing up for it.

[Cyberpyr8]

Oh very cool! It looks great and made me really consider one. A potential full shroud is interesting too.

[Apaches]

Actually working on a Full shroud option atm not sure of the design yet but we will do something before its over.

[Myrkul]

Apaches

We actually did change the barrel collar o-ring on all of the models after this conversation, just made sense and it worked. As far as the detent goes we tried a breach system that had detents in it but for some reason it chopped consistently so the idea was scrapped. First I've actually ever heard of the paint issue and wish I had heard earlier, never really had an issue like this occur. We've been to pretty much 90% of all the east coast major scenarios games this year and never had an issue. What type of field paint was it if you don't mind me asking.

That's great to hear that you ARE listening and got the "o" ring issue resolved! That goes a long way. You never did send me the free T-Shirt though...

I'm not terribly surprised that adding a detent caused more paint breaks. The barrel assembly was kind of "wiggly" for lack of a better term. I could see a single ball bearing style detent throwing the insert off center just slightly, and causing it to smack the paintball the wrong way. My guess is that the N1 needs a dual detent system to keep the insert centered each shot. With how small modern paint is most guns need dual detents anyway at this point. To cut down on wear on the inserts, and be less intrusive to the barrel operation, I would have gone with dual spyder detents similar to Doc's automag barrel adapter.





That would be the golden ticket as far as adding Detent's to the N1.

To help with the roll back issue, there probably needs to be some way to adjust how far back or forward the # 310 90 durometer "O" ring sits on the front seal plug. If you have small paint, you dial it forward to remove excess space in the breach, for larger paint you dial it back. Small paint isn't just a nova specific issue either, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the latest update to the shocker platform is an adjustable length bolt designed to do exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QvvzysP8K8&t=363s


Not sure about Johnny dread, But I play in the dead center of the midwest, in the Kansas City Metro Area. Field paint is HK Army Level 3 (0.675). We used to be able to get D3fy level 3 as well (0.679) but our field no longer stocks that. The N1 did do slightly better with D3fy, but still not great. I will say that I was wildly impressed with the regulator on the Nova. Easily the most consistent regulator I've ever used, if you guys ever drop an aftermarket regulator I'd probably buy 20 of them and put them on everything.

To actually get the N4 to give the Emek a run for it's money, it would have to be able to shoot any paint, no matter how small and shitty, flawlessly. Only way I've found to consistently do that is to bevel the front edge of the bolt aggressively so that it doesn't clip off the bottom of what is now decidedly a .67 caliber paintball.



I've tested the beveled bolts or some form of ramp if the bolt is locked in one orientation, across at numerous different marker platforms (Bushmasters, Impulses, Tippmanns, Spyders, Shockers, Autocockers, Automags, a Desert Fox, ICD's Cat Line,) and it works flawlessly in getting all of them to shoot ANY paint, because it lifts up the second paintball in the ball stack instead of clipping it off. Eclipse figured this out years ago when they came out with their cure bolt system, but honestly they are starting to sleeping on it now, and while all their bolts are all still beveled, paint has shrunk so much that the bevel isn't aggressive enough anymore for the truly tiny paint.

If you can work out the quality control issues with the N4, and start slapping aggressively beveled bolts in them from the factory, it might actually be possible to dethrone the Emek, especially with how damn consistent your regulators are.

[cfos00]

I actually heavily bevel my bolts for mt r/t cocker systems, and it's worked wonders in stopping chops in the feedneck. It really does help a ton.

[Apaches]

Interesting, I'll pass it along. If I owe you a shirt hit me up Tuesday and I'll get you one out. Monday is going to be crazy so def. Tuesday.

[Myrkul]

Interesting, I'll pass it along. If I owe you a shirt hit me up Tuesday and I'll get you one out. Monday is going to be crazy so def. Tuesday.

Right on. You can see how aggressive the rollback is with tiny paint in this picture.



I'm like 99% sure that's most of the issue.

I'll for sure hit you up Tuesday about the shirt, I always need good T-shirts! I was promised one on the phone when sharing the "O" Ring durometer fix.

[Euphie]

I actually had a bit of trouble playing with my N4 today, I can't for the life of me figure out what it is doing. It developed the tiniest of tiny leaks, but it also started skipping shots and then getting to a point where it just wasn't feeding. I figured my Ricochet must just not be working right so I put my Viewloader Eye-force on there and I could clearly see the paint in the feedneck, but it just wouldn't feed any paint into the breech. Took the hopper off, put a stack of three balls in the feed tube and it seemed to shoot those. Very confused I put the Eye Force on my Shocker Sport and it fired without issue. It felt like the bolt wasn't coming back far enough, but it didn't seem to matter if I was pulling the trigger quickly or slowly, but I can't really be sure about that because it did seem to load the balls when I put them directly into the breech so there had to be enough room to fit them in there.

I got home and tried my 9v Revolution and Halo and had similar issues where it just wasn't seeming to shoot paint, only air. I suppose I am gonna take it apart and make sure all the o-rings are in their proper place and try and figure out what is going on. Also since it has a very minor leak, I suppose I need to figure out where that is, the leak goes away when you hold the trigger so I don't think it is the air line or the regulator. A

[ChoSanJuan]

Did you ever get this resolved? I had an issue right off the back and it was the spool clip. Talked to the fine folks at Nova and got me hooked up with a fix. Wonder if you are in the same batch as mine?

[johnl4533]

Any idea on when the metal grip frame is supposed to be hitting the market?

[Vegabond]

no, I may see them next week at Hell Survivors and can ask but with them releasing autocockers, if they were doing a metal n4 frame I would bet its on the back burner

Edit: they will not be at Hell Survivors. I would reach out to them directly with that question