Smart parts just won't give it up.

[FlightMedic938]

Nish That information sure changes it up. Do they still own the rights to electronic markers?

[The Jayster]

Nish That information sure changes it up. Do they still own the rights to electronic markers?

As far as I know, and anyone can correct me if I'm wrong, I believe whatever patent they had was sold off when Smart Parts went bankrupt.

[martix_agent]

As far as I know, and anyone can correct me if I'm wrong, I believe whatever patent they had was sold off when Smart Parts went bankrupt.

and i'm pretty confident that patent is now expired, as well.

What really surprised me is that it didn't jumpstart a mech game, like we have now. I guess that just wasn't cool enough back then. I know I wouldn't have gone to mech play back then.

[Nish]

Remember, that was also a time of the BPS arms race where rate of fire was all that mattered to a big part of the game. The era that gave us uncapped semi, ramping, force-feed hoppers and eyes. Walking the trigger to ramp up to 15-25bps on an out of the box electro sounded a lot better, to a lot of people than spending hours and as much if not more money finely tuning a mech that was more effort to shoot quickly.

[The Jayster]

Remember, that was also a time of the BPS arms race where rate of fire was all that mattered to a big part of the game. The era that gave us uncapped semi, ramping, force-feed hoppers and eyes. Walking the trigger to ramp up to 15-25bps on an out of the box electro sounded a lot better, to a lot of people than spending hours and as much if not more money finely tuning a mech that was more effort to shoot quickly.

100%. I played old school tournaments in the mid 90's and our sponsor was Brass Eagle. One night we were having drinks with the BE rep and after a few rounds he said something like "guys, we're about to enter the electro market. We'll distribute this gun called the Angel". I proceeded to ask him if it would shoot as nicely as the SP/PVI Shocker and he replied "who cares? That thing shoots insanely fast".

[martix_agent]

Remember, that was also a time of the BPS arms race where rate of fire was all that mattered to a big part of the game. The era that gave us uncapped semi, ramping, force-feed hoppers and eyes. Walking the trigger to ramp up to 15-25bps on an out of the box electro sounded a lot better, to a lot of people than spending hours and as much if not more money finely tuning a mech that was more effort to shoot quickly.

yea, I remember. I'm just kinda suprised it took basically until after their patent expired to get new good-shooting mech guns.
You're right though, the Tippman worked as good as it needed to, and everyone else was chasing rate of fire.

However, if you double trigger some mech guns today, I'm guessing you can inconsistently hit 10bps.

[Nish]

I wouldn't doubt it for a second.

[zinger565]

However, if you double trigger some mech guns today, I'm guessing you can inconsistently hit 10bps.

I'm assuming you mean non-pneumatic trigger mechs? Cause I can definitely shoot faster than 10bps on my double-trigger pneu-mag.

[cockerpunk]

see i remember when they denied that DLX was a part of Smart Parts.

always can spot a liar when their story is always changing.



i also love the touting of shocker as ... well a good gun. the shocker was undeniably worse than the automag, and autococker at the time. the angel was the fist gun to really use eletropnumatics to improve the paintball gun. there is a reason why mechanical automags and autocockers lasted as front line tournament guns until force feed and eyes really unleashed the electro in 2001/2/3 ish


i sincerely didnt think at 21 talking with billy, that telling these kind of people they were idiots to their faces would be such a large part of my life, but turns out *waves arms around* im 38 now, and its every single day of my life.

[Txaggie08]

Just stepping back in the game, had really been considering a luxe marker... FSP. Didn't know they where part of it, kills that idea off!

[Trbo323]

I don't know much about any of this but it was a fun read. Question though, is the guy who wrote this wrong? I see people saying he (?) is childish but to play devils advocate I'd be pretty pissed if someone stole my invention and profited from it and then made me spend exuberant amounts of money to get them to stop.

You should really go read the full back story there. Here's the cliff notes version (which is also long)

Sp (Gardner Brothers) team up with pnuventures (another paintball company) to produce the shocker. Pnuventures goes under (there's debate about if the gardeners had a hand in that) and smart parts ends up with all their stuff.

Gardner Brothers REVISE the shocker patent to basically say "anything with a micro switch that is paintball is our invention" this allows the patent to keep the original patent issue date but the revision never should have been allowed because other markers were already using electronics and micro switches prior to this revision. The problem is at the time and still today the US patent office is so overworked they basically rubber stamp anything and let you Duke it out in court. The Gardner Brothers knew this and took advantage of it.

Bogus patent in hand they first sent cease and desist letters which the rest of the industry rightfully laughed at.

Their first target was ICD and it was widely known at the time that the owner of AKA Jerry Dobbins recently underwent major back surgery. I've heard he wasn't able to make any of the court dates because of the surgery, don't know if that's true but I imagine he couldn't make many at a minimum. But they really went after ICD because they were a small company with only a small ability to defend themselves in court. Gardeners knew that any win in court would set precedent for future cases, players even helped raise money to defend ICD but the gardeners have some prior experience in law and in the end they won.

A licencing program was started as other companies saw the writing on the wall. One hold out was AKA who the gardeners took to court, again money was raised by players but the precedent set in the ICD case was what did them in really. SP won again.

When the gardeners turned their sights on Tom Kaye with AGD, Tom straight up refused to give them a penny. He said something along the lines of "I'd rather never make another e marker than give the gardeners one cent" true to his word he never did which is why AGD has never released another e marker since production on the emag stopped. This patent fiasco also led to Tom leaving the sport (later) which if you ask me was a huge blow. Tom is one of the smartest and nicest people to ever be involved in paintball.

WDP finally made the madness stop as they were able to track down one of the original designers to the pnuventures shocker and legally buy his rights to it. Because of that when the gardeners tried to take WDP to court it was ruled that they owned a piece of the patent so SP could not sue them. It's largely suspected that dye threatened sp with a counter suit over SPs use of their spool valve technology if SP ever came after dye for the e marker patent.

So yes, they "owned" the patent but it never should have been awarded to them in the first place. Those two dicks really stifled innovation in our sport for at least a decade as many new companies couldn't get started or compete when they were being forced to pay the Garner brother just to produce any e marker.

People like to point out that the ion got lots of players into the sport, that's true it did but I really wonder how many other markers there could have been competing at the same price range if most of the other companies didn't have to pay sp to produce a marker of their own. The proto rail was really the only competitor at the time and that's because dye wasn't paying royalties

That was really chapter one. After that they tried to force all of paintball to switch to 50cal. The Gardner Brothers are responsible for hindering our sort more than anything else ever has all so they could make a quick buck



Sent from my motorola edge 2024 using Tapatalk

[Paintslinger16]

This the way I remember it also, the Pnuventures ordeal if I remember it right was something like a breach of contract with manufacturing of the guns, SP bought more guns then the small company could possibly produce, as they were set up to be the national distributor. When the contract was breached due to non performance,
( didn’t deliver qty of guns ordered ) SP sued them, being essentially a start up with no money they waved the flag and in lieu of cash gave up the rights to the the original gun. It was then that it gets renamed the Shocker and that part of the history is revised so it seems that the Gardeners invented the whole concept.

[FastGas]

one might contend that the Ion was definitely a sales success but the ROF it provided to a lot of new, irresponsible players added to the general souring of the sport's appeal.