there are some good reasons to not actually use steel (is it actually illegal or is that just an urban legend? i've honestly never looked it up),
I understand (informally, since I don't really care enough to look it up) that paintball "markers" only escape categorisation as firearms or even air guns because they use frangible ammunition.
Ammo doesn't effect the
categorisation of airsoft toys one way or another, since for once we actually got a very sensibly written definition in
PCA 2017 S125.
57A Exception for airsoft guns
(1) An “airsoft gun” is not to be regarded as a firearm for the purposes of this Act.
(2) An “airsoft gun” is a barrelled weapon of any description which—
(a) is
designed to discharge only a small plastic missile (whether or not it is also
capable of discharging any other kind of missile), and
(b) is not capable of discharging a missile (
of any kind) with kinetic energy at the muzzle of the weapon that exceeds the permitted level.
(2)(a) is what protects us. (2)(b) is what we like to ignore, particularly HPA or anything over-volumed which could Joule creep to infinity and beyond with heavier ammo.
Hopefully that will never be an issue, but if it gets out that some throbber really is slinging steel, potentially from a hot gun (I use "gun" deliberately here), and most particularly in Scotchland of all places, then I can see it ending badly for us.
As to whether the act of shooting someone becomes illegal if you use steel cored or steel BBs, I guess it comes down to consent. We consent to be shot with plastic / "plastic" up to the site limit, although that's rather implicit. For all that sites waste their time and ours with meaningless waivers and disclaimers, I've yet to see one that actually serves as an explicit consent form listing exactly what to expect, i.e. being hit with said BBs at said energy.
If someone's shooting at higher energies, I don't consent to that, but then again, I don't want it to become a legal issue either, given the potential consequences from the attention. I'd rather that the culprit was just permabanned out of the game, everywhere.
As to being shot with steel-core or steel, I'm fairly relaxed about that as long as the energies are within the site limits. Although there's the issue of 2.3J snipers carrying more energy out to the point of impact, but we've already covered that the way to deal with that is lower muzzle energy to compensate for higher mass.
And maybe that's something that sites should already be considering. Is it reasonable to have the same muzzle energy and MED for two players, both of whom are shooting 2.3J at the muzzle, but one is slinging 0.5J and the other 0.2J (and sadly I have seen a new sniper player doing that)?
I imagine it's not something that sites want to think about, but if not then maybe they should be coming up with some harder rules about maximum and minimum masses, or just binning off higher energy toys altogether. POW airsoft, for example, has got rid of DMRs entirely because of the potential for shenanigans, require 2 games on site before you get to snipe, and have a 2.17J maximum energy for bolties.
i can see it playing merry hell with magazines, feeding etc then scratching the hell out of the barrel as a goodbye present.
Sure, it's not a great idea, but maybe some players just don't care. I've got plenty of cheap mags and swapped-out brass barrels that I'd be happy to sacrifice in an experiment, and the contact patch of an s-hop is tuppence worth of RTV silicone.
and as already mentioned MED rules would need revamping, for example to maintain a given MED you'd need to drop the power, which might not be the worst given poor range judgement, accidental close range strikes and kicking mustang are a thing.
Agreed.
however it might ironically solve one problem- it'll be more biodegradable than "plastic".
Also agreed, and another thing that produces a cognitive dissonance blind spot in sites and players. 6 months at 60C in an industrial composter is not 6 months lying on the ground in woodland.
i don't think there's any decent field expedient solution [for chronoing] that which doesn't invoke the joule creep issue. at least as long as chrono's are just measuring velocity compared to say a ballistic pendulum that can actually measure energy (and would be immune to bb weight liars)
Field chrono using the site's 0.4g+ BBs. If it's OK, move on. If it comes out high, then look harder, i.e. what it chronos at using the player's ammo, and what that ammo actually is (as opposed to what they say that it is).
I honestly believe that if you're not doing that, then you might as well not bother chronoing at all. Because (effectively) voluntary pre-game chronoing and taking players' word for it on ammo weights only tests honest players for honesty, and does nothing to address the problem players.
