luvmytoolz
Member
That's some serious looking paintball gun!
Visiting Las Vegas, any place I should check out?
- Thread starter Tom the Remodeler
- Start date
onocoffee
Member
Back then ('94), we were pretty serious. Even played in what was the national league that was the forerunner to the championship Tom played in 2017.
rmhinden
Member
If you go to In-n-Out do a search for "in-n-out secret menu" .
BTW, they are all over the west coast, not just a Las Vegas thing.
Bob
Packard
Member
I used to go to Red Rock Canyon (just outside Vegas, but perhaps in a different galaxy) for rock climbing. Many routes to climb and I had the place was mostly to myself. The climbs are spread out so much that I rarely saw another climber.
You do have to be careful of the rattlesnakes. Not the really dangerous ones like we have in New York State, but still—it would require a quick drive to the emergency room for an anti-venom shot.
Friends would tease me because, “You went to Vegas and you didn’t gamble?”
So I asked, “How much money would I have to lose to meet your ‘gambling’ threshold?” I was told I had to lose at least $100.00.
So for a whole week, after dinner I went to the casinos. Try as much as I could, I could not lose the hundred. I would be down to my last five dollars and I would get “21”, or hit the right number on the roulette wheel. At the end, I was up about $130.00. For all the time it took me to get to $130.00, I would have made more working at McDonalds.
NOTE: I did not watch the entire video, so I will not comment on his technique or equipment.
You do have to be careful of the rattlesnakes. Not the really dangerous ones like we have in New York State, but still—it would require a quick drive to the emergency room for an anti-venom shot.
Friends would tease me because, “You went to Vegas and you didn’t gamble?”
So I asked, “How much money would I have to lose to meet your ‘gambling’ threshold?” I was told I had to lose at least $100.00.
So for a whole week, after dinner I went to the casinos. Try as much as I could, I could not lose the hundred. I would be down to my last five dollars and I would get “21”, or hit the right number on the roulette wheel. At the end, I was up about $130.00. For all the time it took me to get to $130.00, I would have made more working at McDonalds.
NOTE: I did not watch the entire video, so I will not comment on his technique or equipment.
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Tom the Remodeler
Member
Hi @onocoffee ,
Hah, yeah blast from the past! 2017 was my last season, playing for St. Paul Vintage. I think we placed 8th overall for the season in Division 3. Awesome adventure, played events in Las Vegas, Dallas, Atlantic City, Chicago, and Orlando.
The sport itself is alive and well, I'd love to visit a tournament again sometime, perhaps a trip to Chicago?......
Short video:
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Tom the Remodeler
Member
I'm remembering this video from 2018, a lot of great footage of my teammates from St. Paul Vintage and our "brother" team Indianapolis Mutiny:
Packard
Member
About 20 years ago, a company adapted paint ball technology to deliver pepper spray. The delivery system was a 2-shot derringer. The derringer needed to deliver the less-than-lethal munition to a target about the size of a man’s face—as indeed, it needed to hit the assailant’s face to be effective. That early device was wildly inaccurate due to the short site radius, ammo that fit loosely in the barrels, round ammo and lack of rifling.
There is a company that is now selling a vastly upgraded delivery system that resembles a modern semi-auto firearm. They advertise on TV. They say it can shoot upto 60 feet. No mention of accuracy. No mention of rifling, though I have read that both round and elliptical shaped projectiles are available. No mention on how tightly the ammo fits in the barrels.
So how accurate are short barreled paint ball guns? Can they reliably hit a man-sized head at 15 feet? At 10 feet? A $15.00 pepper spray canister can.
Sorry for straying off-course.
onocoffee
Member
Tom - that's awesome. Many years ago, I played for Team Ronin in Hawaii, as well as occasionally as the Carter Machine Landsharks. I had been away from the game for many many years until Earon passed away a couple of years ago and we flew to SoCal for his memorial game at SC Village. That old MiniCocker had been stylized by Earon and then I had Rude Boyz in Chicago do the internals (they were at the cutting edge in AutoCocker tuning back then). I now get out there a couple of times a year because my nephew has an interest - but not quite as deep as me or my brother (he played for Image in Maryland). Lately, it's been strictly Stock Class with an old Carter Buzzard.
Tom the Remodeler
Member
Hi @Packard ,
The standard field size for a NXL field is 150' x 120'. It's entirely possible (and expected) to be able to hit an opposing player, on the run, from 150'. Of course it takes practice and you won't hit them on the run with a single shot, but yes the tournament-level markers are quite accurate. Because players are running and hiding behind inflatable bunkers, the markers cycle quickly. Current rules limit markers to cycling at 10.5 balls per second, but in the older days (early 2000s) I believe guys were easily achieving 20+ balls per second, limited by how fast the feeder could feed balls into the marker.
The standard paintballs are 0.68" in diameter. Barrels are ~14" long, with the first ~7" being a smooth bore, the last ~7" going to a larger size with lots of porting. Balls are as close to a perfect sphere as possible, with more expensive tournament balls being perfectly round and quite brittle, and cheaper recreational balls being less perfectly round, and less brittle so they tend to hurt more.
During practice, a common hobby was to throw a paintball up in the air (~15') and shoot it with another paintball. The trick was to pull the trigger when the tossed paintball was at the apogee of the curve, but yeah with some practice many players can hit a target ~0.68" diameter from ~12-15'.
The markers don't have any kind of sights or aiming devices, it's all just muscle memory.
The markers that ICE is using to shoot citizens with pepper balls are cheap, "rental" grade paintball markers, so accuracy is going to be much worse, and I suspect the pepper balls they're shooting have a really hard shell (ouch!), as opposed to the incredibly brittle shells used in tournament paintball.
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Tom the Remodeler
Member
Hi @onocoffee
That's great that you still get out to play! I'm so busy with work that I just don't have the time. My hope is to get work to a point where I can get out a few times a year for rec-ball. If I do make it out again, my preference would be to get a refurbished mechanical marker (Autococker or similar), or even give Pump a try. When I was playing competitively I usually played as a "3" (back line), but I was a pretty good snap shooter, would be fun to redevelop that skill with a pump marker
Packard
Member
I was watching one of those reality police shows. One of the cops pulls out a Taser, and instead of yelling out “I’ve got less-than-lethal’”, he yells out the shortened form: “I got ‘lethal’”. And everyone accepts that as the short form of less-than-lethal. I’m sort of literal about the use of language, and I find that short form less-than-acceptable.