If Tom Kaye or Jack Wood or Simon Stevens designed an Airsoft gun.....

[Meleager7]

i've been thinking about what Airsoft might have looked like, if the paintball industry top designers got a hold of Airsoft first ? I don't know the history of Airsoft too well, but it seems to have been influenced by Larping right from it's inception, and as such cramming BB shooting hardware into firearm designs not intended to shoot or load a tiny, light round projectile.

If the best paintball designers were to design an airsoft gun from the ground up, and the main design goal was to simply shoot airsoft BB's reliably, fast, and safely with good ergonomics and high capacity , what would that airsoft gun have looked like? Would it be a hopper fed design? Or would it be box mag fed, with some Tom Kaye miniaturized tiny warp feed? Would Jack Wood design a mini gamma core just for airsoft? Or would Simon Stevens design the smallest , autococking, closed bolt airsoft gun ?

[XEMON]

Not sure about specific hypetetical designs, but once you go with a solid plastic projectile, a lot of "problems" go away.
Hopper/box/spring loaded system are much easier (no risk of crushing the projectile) and the bolt/valve can be much rougher (no gelatin she'll to blow/crack).

A continuous air stream and push the BB in front of it might be an option at this point ...

[flyweightnate]

That's what my dad said when I was messing with it in high school. Just like a paint sprayer - air, then ammo.

[autococker04]

I’m imagining a curly straw full of bbs with positive pressure to push them into the breech for a loader. And probably a constant stream of air that shoots a constant stream of bbs as long as the trigger is held, with a trap door that blocks the bbs and valve that cuts the air when the trigger isn’t pulled.

edit: and it would look like a super soaker.

[Trbo323]

I doubt they would have many designs with HPA. There's a reason most airsoft stuff is electric/spring drive. Cost. Most players seemed to top out spending about $300 on a "high end" airsoft gun when I was working a paintball/airsoft shop

If you open up those electrics, they are like 90% plastic inside

Now one thing they would do better is design better mags. All the mags that were at the shop I worked at you had to manually wind up.... In the middle of your firefight.... This was just seen as normal by all the players

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[martix_agent]

They wind up magazines? Is this because the magazine also doubles as a reservoir and they're winding the spring fed system?

[Seajay]

The Tippman M4 is the perfect example. All mechanical Co2/HPA flexible magazines. Loud, accurate, robust.

[flyweightnate]

There's a product segment that runs on HPA, and some of it is less LARPy. I think they borrow the term "PCP" from air rifles.

[Arthur]

Yeah anytime I try and research airsoft guns I'm just overrun with spam, no idea whats up or down. My nephews have showed me some nice guns that run on HPA though. They're spendier too.

[SignOfZeta]

The best paintball gun designers designed the guns for the games they themselves were playing. I can’t imagine Bob Long talking through vampire teeth...or putting three flashlights on his gun. I think the need to verify a hit was what made those people choose paintball in the first place, and once that was done they did with paintball what they could with the skills they had. By 1988 paintball guns were designed to shoot paintballs and maybe look sort of pretty. That’s all they did. They already had BB guns and even yellow plastic round ones back when the Splatmaster was being designed and nobody into paintball took them seriously. A paint round that worked was the innovation that make “survival” sports possible since in the 80s LARPing was only known as a good reason to beat someone up and not the trillion dollar industry/porn genre that it is today. The CCI of airsoft will emerge from the airsoft scene...but even then it will be hard to tell since airsoft tech is nearly perfect, cosmetic shells looking to be the main area of innovation. That and most guns come from bland opaque companies that are mainly a shell for an Asian sweatshop.

Paintball guns needed innovation just to be practical (not breaking rounds, water based paint, barrel plus, masks, all that). Airsoft...how you can you even say what’s practical when the game is predicated on the target conceding a hit? I mean, how does a gun designer try to help you archive more hits when they can’t even tell if they’ve been hit? The level of innovation that it took just to make the Nelspot into the Phantom is more than what’s needed for airsoft so why innovate? They had full auto 2000rnd capacity photo real M60s in Japan in the mid 90s. I think that’s it. It’s perfect.

[Meleager7]

The Tippman M4 is the perfect example. All mechanical Co2/HPA flexible magazines. Loud, accurate, robust.

That M4 does look like a decent air soft offering from a paintball company, who are experts at blowback markers and they come from real firearm roots too. I just think it would be neat to see something new and innovative in Airsoft that does not resemble an AR-15

[russc]

I'm pretty sure the current state of the art in Airsoft is trending towards electropneumatic, HPA-fed designs that take direct inspiration from high end paintball guns.

[Marauder_Pilot]

I'm pretty sure the current state of the art in Airsoft is trending towards electropneumatic, HPA-fed designs that take direct inspiration from high end paintball guns.

Yup. There's a fair number of drop-in HPA engines to fit most varieties of airsoft guns at this point (Polarstar, Wolverine, Mancraft, ect). AFAIK, the Tippmann M4 is the only out-of-the-box, non-GBB HPA-powered gun out there, although lots of companies sell pre-converted HPA guns as well.

There's a vocal segment bitching about how HPA guns are turning airsoft into paintball, which by that they mean that they're afraid of getting run over by high-RPS guns wielded by guys wearing I4s and wearing comfy pants instead of way too much Condor gear. But most people are starting to trend that direction.

The big downside is the cost. The engines alone start in the $300 range, then you need a regulator setup (Usually tank-mounted, think back to when everyone was running an A5 with a remote line to a Female Stab on their vest-mounted HPA tank and that's where airsoft is going) and a tank and all that jazz. Price of admission for an HPA setup in airsoft is about a grand, which is unfortunate because most HPA engines are basically just an Ion with a teeny little nozzle as far as tech goes.

[SignOfZeta]

...”engines”?

[Cunha]

Valve trains.

Guts.

Airsoft started with c02, and they went to sewing machine style to get rid of the tanks.

Tippmann made the m4 which is too good and basically banned at a lot of places.

So they're not really settled up on how to do this stuff. To me it makes sense to be electro pneumatic, because its mega consistent and the best, and doesn't wear out. You just need to fit an air tank which means a lot of rifles aren't going to work, but most can be sorted out.

But I dont and have never played airsoft. When I first thought about it, all I wanted to do was make an airsoft gun like a paintball gun because I knew it would work better than a sewing machine motor compressor thingie.

At the same time I kinda like the AEG's because its been their style for such a long time, and there are nice things about not using compressed gas.

[Marauder_Pilot]

Tippmann made the m4 which is too good and basically banned at a lot of places.

It really isn't either of those things. It's a good gun, but internally it's still a blowback like all the Tippmanns we know and love. EP conversations are more consistent and more tuneable.

And none of those are banned anywhere except the most hardcore milsims (Which also regulate mag sizes, velocity relative to the type of gun, fire rates, etc). Some people whine, and few fields go out of their way to provide HPA fills, but that's more because they're still fairly rare. (My local fields are capped at 50 players per weekend right now, but even before COVID when we'd pull 80-100 people per game, you'd have maybe 1 in 20 people using HPA)

[Meleager7]

I found this really good vid ,where the shooter is using something very custom and non-Larpy, in the spirit of what we were discussing above. It sounds like the Customizer dropped in one of those HPA engine kits mentioned above. The performance is something else!

it must be driving the other Airsoft players nuts ,that his gun doesn’t look like a replica !