Chock

Well Eric, my perfect airsoft grenade would have to be tall, handsome and would take me for a nice meal at a lovely restaurant, then for a romantic stroll along a beach in the moonlight. Oh, and it would have to want world peace.

Whilst that is generally true, later in the war (i.e. after 1943) the MP-40 was actually issued more widely to regular troops. That was a direct response to encountering the Russian army using sub machine guns in larger numbers than most other WW2 forces. Ironically enough, this led the Germans to develop the StG44, which the Russians then used as the inspiration for the AK47 after WW2. However, in spite of the German's desire to hand out the MP40 in larger numbers, unlike the PPSh41 and 43, of which over eight million were produced, the MP40 wasn't produced in the truly massive numbers necessary to make that possible (i.e. only a fraction over a million units according to most records), so whilst it is true that there weren't enough of them to hand over to everyone in the Wehrmacht, the Germans did actually want to do that, particularly in light of their experience against the Russians, who of course had the Germans retreating because of that much better weight of firepower. Thus the Germans did so as much as they could, and there are certainly quite a few instances where entire units were equipped with the MP40 in the closing stages of the war, it's just that it was not the norm for most army units. If you want a truly ridiculous example of MP40 usage however, nothing beats Mary Ure, Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood's MP40s in Where Eagles Dare, which aside from appearing to be loaded with armour-piercing incendiary ammunition, judging by the amount of damage they can do, also seem to be fitted with special high capacity magazines capable of holding hundreds of rounds.

It's not too bad for a modern weapon type (still prefer AKs myself), and it's certainly better looking than the P90. Apparently, some of the PDR's appearance is down to airsoft skirmishers, because Magpul switched development of the (real) PDR's layout over to its training division (which makes airsoft practice CQB weapons). Thus they made an airsoft version of the PDR so they could finalise the ergonomics of the real firearm via the practical experiences of airsoft skirmishers. Not sure if that is putting the cart before the horse or not TBH, but it's certainly a novel approach to ergonomics and haptics

Yeah, I considered that one, however, it's not the cost which made me chose not to go for that; since I work in post production and have made props in the past, I reckon I can make one for less that will look okay, especially since I'm making one from accurate drawings, which I have scaled up slightly. More to the point decision-wise however, although the one you linked to is molded from a genuine movie prop (I think a B stock one), it appears to have picked up some warping during the copying process from what I can see (not an uncommon occurrence when molding copies as anyone who has ever made a kit car AC Cobra will know). Another factor is that I know the movie ones are a touch on the small side for my big head lol. Besides which, making stuff is half the fun! Guess we'll see.

Quite possibly.. Might consider that.

Not going to cost that much to be honest, although it does require me to make the chest armour and the M3 tactical helmet, which is in progress (I'll post some pics when I've got something worth seeing). The helmet and armour are being made from craft foam (20 quid off ebay inc p&p) with some web belts and bits of trim added to them, then there is a drop leg holster attached to the armour (we don't see the pistol much in the movie, so I guess anything which fits my drop-leg holster goes). The MI uniform clothing is pretty basic, it's just a grey short zip-fronted jacket (8 quid off ebay inc p&p) with some black trim added to the collar and sides and some elbow patches in tan added to it, then three unit patches (which I got off ebay for 13 quid inc p&p) sewn onto it and black epaulettes. Under that is a black t-shirt and a black neck gorget. The pants are just plain grey ones with some black trim added along the inside leg (not got those yet, but I expect they'll be about ten quid). The original movie prop boots were in fact just trainers modified with the addition of higher ankle support plus a few velcro straps added, so some lightweight modern US combat boots can easily be modified to look like those. The Mobile Infantry's rifle is the (fictional) bullpup configuration Morita Assault Rifle, which (depending on which soldier was wielding it), is either a full-length Mk1 rifle with an underslung pump action, or a shorter Mk1 carbine version, or a scoped sniper version of the standard rifle, all of which are seen in the movie. Since the Morita is (like the movie itself) a bit of a parody of the rather politically incorrect fascist overtones in the Heinlein novel, it's somewhat comedically over-large (also because it was in reality a fibreglass shell which had a Ruger Mini 14 concealed inside it for the shots in the movie where the Morita was required to actually fire). In practical terms, I would like the load out to actually be usable, so I'm going to make the less stupidly big carbine version of the Morita (which also means I don't have to add the grenade launcher). Looking about for a suitable rifle to modify, I was first considering the recently-made fictional UAR airsoft AEG or perhaps an L85, but I've decided to use the Foreign Legion version of the FAMAS, which is already very close in appearance to the carbine Morita, so it should be a fairly easy transformation to make it look like a Morita without messing about with its functionality. Morita Carbine: http://www.imfdb.org/images/f/fb/HEROCarbine1.JPG FAMAS Carbine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAMAS#mediaviewer/File:FAMAS_F1_with_bayonet.jpg

Just bought a bunch of stuff for the Mobile Infantry load out I'm making, sew on unit patches, a grey jacket to convert into the MI combat jacket, etc.

Depends on how you do it. You have to think about what it is you are trying to emulate whenever trying to achieve a faked look with paint. In this case, it is the notion that dust has settled in bits that are hard to get to, but has rubbed off areas where your uniform, hands, webbing etc have brushed against it. Let's be honest, with something like an M16 Armalite type of weapon, you have to keep the real thing clean because it is manufactured to fine tolerances, unlike an AK, where everything is as slack as a bag of spanners, so dust won't easily jam it, whereas an Armalite will jam easily in those conditions if not kept clean, which is why the originals had a cleaning kit in the stock. But out in the plains of Afghan or the desert of Iraq, that's easier said than done, so you'd wipe the thing with an oiled rag and hope it picked up all the dust and kept it out of the mechanism. In that sense, you might simulate that look by, as others have suggested, painting sand colour on it and wiping it off so it only stays in the recesses, however, if you want to do something like that without resorting to slopping paint all over the thing and then wiping it off, then you could as I suggested, try painting it lightly sand coloured and then dry brushing the black gun metal colour on, which would only go in the easily accessible areas, so would simulate the sand and dust only being retained in crevices when the thing had been wiped with an oiled rag. Both techniques will do the job, but one is messier than the other, so it's up to you. Just try either technique on something else before attacking you pride and joy!. There is another technique you could try too by the way, which is to let down a sand coloured acrylic paint so it is very watery, and then let that flood into crevices; when the acrylic dries, the pigment would only settle in recesses, much like dust would. Acrylic is much easier to sort out if you overdo it, since before it has dried, it can easily be washed off areas where you've gone over the top with a brush dipped in water or a wet tissue, but the acrylic when dry, will be waterproof. Acrylic dries much faster than enamel too, so it is quicker to get things done, and you can usually find a set of cheap acrylic paints in most supermarkets too, so it's easier to get hold of and less expensive. Yet another technique is to use a clear flat varnish with some talcum powder in it, which will make the thing look a little lighter and dustier. Note that adding talc to paint has the effect of making paint more matt too, so it's kind of an added bonus.

Really, if you are after a 'dusty effect' what you should do, is dry-brush the thing. If you are not familiar with that technique, it's where you dip a brush in paint, then wipe most of the paint off the brush with a paper towel until it would barely put any paint down, and then lightly pass the brush over the surface of the object so that the paint only catches the raised bits. This is a technique beloved of plastic modellers and movie prop makers, to make things look like metal when they are plastic, by painting things black and then dry-brushing a flat alloy (don't use silver) colour over the raised bits, then doing the same with thinned blues and purples to give it a blued look. But for the look you are after, you'd want to paint it with flat sand colour and then dry-brush thinned flat black on the raised bits, to make it look like the paint had worn off and revealed the metal underneath, which had tarnished in the air (which is why you use black). Note that you don't want to use a typical paint brush for dry-brushing, as you won't get a subtle effect; what you want is a very soft fanned out make up brush, like this kind of thing: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Techniques-RLT-1401-Powder-Brush/dp/B004TSF8R4/ref=sr_1_23?s=beauty&ie=UTF8&qid=1413821882&sr=1-23 You can get that sort of make up brush in any chemist or pound shop for a quid. Before you try it on your gun (and possibly f**k it up if you aren't used to dry-brushing), practice the technique first by painting any old which has raised up bits a sand colour, let it dry, and then try dry-brushing black over it. Humbrol (matt) paints will do a good job. If you want a bit of a worn metal look on some parts, use metalcote flat alloy enamel paint, - definitely not gloss silver - or it will look crap, alloy will look good, but don't overdo it. Most model and craft shops sells those paints, or you can get em online. You can fix any paint job by spraying over with matt varnish (lightly! use thin coats and take your time). At a push you can also use hair spray to fix the paint, although that would not be waterproof, so matt varnish in an aerosol is a better bet (unless you happen to have an airbrush, in which case use that).

Actually, the reason it says 1919 on many Great War medals and memorials, is because although hostilities ended in 1918 with the signing of the Armistice between Germany and the Allied powers on November 11 1918, the state of war between the main countries did not officially end until the signing of the Treaty or Versailles on June 28 1919, which was then registered with the League of Nations on 21 October 1919. So the war actually ended in 1919 even though the shooting stopped in 1918.

Welcome aboard

Well, it's not the first time it's been done. The StG 44 Krummlauf was able to fire 30 degrees around a corner in WW2

This is a good rule of thumb, however, when you know a bit more about various airsoft guns, and can avoid buying pieces of crap which look like a bargain, then it is actually possible to occasionally find a bargain on some of those BB gun sites. However, note that the service and support from them is generally appalling, so you'd better be sure of what you are doing if buying from them.

Yeah, I saw that too, and if that is not a typo on the box artwork, then it pretty much has to be an airsoft gun and not an airgun, since air gun calibres are .22 (5.5mm) and .177 (4.5mm), which are about the only calibres airguns come in. .177 air guns can fire BBs (i.e. original metal 4.5mm BBs), but airsoft is only in 6mm and 8mm calibres, so if it is 6mm calibre, unless it is using custom ammunition, then it has to be a CO2 airsoft pistol.

Well, if you wanna pay less than 300 Euros, which is about 240 quid, then there are loads of really good rifles in the 150 to 200 quid price range. As others have noted, CYMA guns are pretty good, AKs and M16 types, although CYMA AKs tend to be better than their M16 variants. G&G's various Colt Armalite-based weapons such as the numerous M16 and M4 variants they make are very good, and well worth a look. In spite of not being metal, they look very realistic indeed, and frankly, whilst a metal airsoft rifle is nice, the polymer and plastic ones are better than you might imagine and look realistic enough, after all, when you hold a real M4, your hands are generally only touching polymer bits anyway, since the grips are invariably made from that rather than metal. Upper end metal versions of D-Boys M4s are pretty good too, although D-Boys weapons are not as popular in the UK as they are in the US. Alternatively, if you fancy something a little bit different, you might take a look at something like the Jing Gong (JG) Heckler and Koch G36, or their SIG 552. JG's G36 is very popular with airsoft sites, where you will find many places buying them in bulk to use as hire guns, because they are robust and simple to use. One of the advantages of an airsoft G36, is that the real thing's body is made from polymer rather than metal, so polymer/plastic ones look and feel realistic. The G36 also has a folding stock, which means you can fold that up and use it for Close Quarter Battles without having to wield a big long weapon. The real G36 cannot actually do that, as firing the real thing with the stock folded for prolonged periods damages it, so it's meant more for storage and making it easy to carry in and out of armoured personnel carriers, but that's not the case with airsoft ones, which you can cheerfully fire all day long with the stock folded! Also worth noting, is that the G36 has loads of accessory rails all over it, so it is very easy to mount things such as lasers, sights, tactical lights etc, etc to it without paying for a bunch of add on parts. It also has a nice magazine system, with built in lugs on the side of the magazines, enabling you to clip several magazines together 'jungle style' to make reloading much quicker. The SIG 552 rifle has a similar magazine clip system too, enabling you to clip multiple mags together, and JG make one of those as well, which is also very good and like their G36, is only about 160 quid. I have a G36 as my spare which I take to skirmishes in case my D-Boys M4 has a problem (not that it ever has thus far). If you spend less by going for one of these options, that will leave you some cash with which to get other stuff, such as face protection, gloves, a webbing belt, some boots, a sight or a tactical light, or even a back up weapon such as a pistol and a holster to put the thing in. You don't need to spend 300 Euros to get a decent rifle capable of serving you well at skirmishes. I see loads of people using CMYAs and G&Gs week in week out with no problems whatsoever.

Within (well almost) your budget, being full metal with a wooden grip? That would be this one, although it is seven quid over your 300 Euro budget: http://www.fire-support.co.uk/product/lct-ak-baby-aeg-airsoft-gun

We had a guy on our airsoft team the other week who was in a wheelchair (paralysed from the waist down), and he was kicking ass. He would occasionally drop out of the wheelchair and go prone behind cover (and this was indoor CQB stuff). I saw him hold off four bad guys for ages doing just that. We had to help him on the stairs (but only to carry his chair, he was making it up and down the stairs on his own), other than that, he was self sufficient. You can do airsoft without running about, he was the living proof of it.

Got it. The A10 Thunderbolt II and the AH64 Apache are both bullpups and not bullpups (at the same time) but depending on which weapon you have selected; either the wing pylon weapons or the nose mounted gun, whereas the Sopwith Camel and the Spitfire are most definitely not, but the Me 109 and Fw 190 are both at the same time providing they have the gun pods attached under the wings (unless you happen to pull the joystick back far enough whilst pressing the fire buttons, when they revert to not being bullpups, except when you are viewing them from the side). A Bayonet is not a bullpup when you have it attached to your rifle, but is a bullpup when not fixed and you hide it behind your back. A hand grenade is a bullpup when you move your arm back to commence throwing it, but as it passes over your head before you release it, it stops being a bullpup. Glad that's cleared up then.

Basically it comes down to kinetic energy. i.e. how much energy the thing has stored in it as it moves. Heavier objects store more energy as they move. Push a big heavy car at ten mph and then try to stop it by grabbing it with your hands, then do the same with a baby's pram. You can stop the pram easily in comparison to the car. Now substitute that analogy for BBs of differing weights, where your hands are replaced by aerodynamic drag, form drag, parasitic drag etc, i.e. all the things the air is doing to slow something down; the air has a harder time stopping the heavier BB because, like the car versus the baby's pram, the heavier BB has more stored energy. One of the trade offs is of course that a heavier BB will have more ballistic drop because if the heavy and the light BBs are both given the same rotation by a hop up unit, their similar size and shape means they will both be creating the same amount of lift. If that lift is sufficient to keep the lighter BB flying level, it won't be sufficient to overcome the weight of the heavier BB.

Wide variance in pricing, but here's a few places http://www.airsoftworld.net/king-arms-m1a1-thompson-sub-machine-gun.html http://www.fifthcolumnairsoft.co.uk/KingArms_thompson1928-_-_AEG.html http://www.red1airsoft.co.uk/King-Arms-Thompson-M1A1 http://www.hobbyking.co.uk/hobbyking/store/__48490__King_Arms_M1928_Chicago_EBB.html

To be a bullpup, a pistol would also have to be clumsy and slow to switch the mags with, eject the shell cases into your face if you try to shoot it in anything other than one conventional way (or the soldier alongside you when you use it any way), and deafen you when you fire it. Which, come to think of it, means the CZ VZ 61 Skorpion MP qualifies on nearly all counts

True, but in the example TacMaster was quoting, he did mention that the people in question were 'unfamiliar'.

All laws are open to interpretation, if they were not, lots of lawyers would be out of business (yeah, i know, how would that be a bad thing? lol). So the really important thing to note with the Violent Crimes Reduction Act and the two-toning it mentions, is the reason for it and the intent of anyone who has something which could be mistaken for a real firearm. The reason for two-toning is to make it readily apparent to an uninformed observer, that you are not genuinely brandishing a real firearm, because the purpose of the Act is to reduce Violent Crime, i.e. to prevent that uninformed observer from feeling under threat of violence when seeing something which they may mistake for a real firearm. Don't underestimate the chances of that happening either; it's easy to forget that in being knowledgeable about guns, we are a minority here - not everyone is an expert on weaponry, in fact, the vast majority of people know very little about guns and could easily mistake something as harmless as the extension pipe from a vacuum cleaner for a gun if they saw someone wandering about in a back garden holding it like it was a weapon. If you think this is not the case, ask the average person what an M4 is; they will probably say it's the motorway that runs across the bottom of Wales which goes to London rather than telling you it's a variant of the Armalite rifle. So, ask yourself these questions: If you are in your back garden with your airsoft gun, who is going to, or could potentially, see it? If you are in a small terraced house which backs onto other terraced houses, it could be a lot of people, if you are in some detached house in a leafy suburb, probably a lot less people. I would balance the likelihood that something seen at a distance might be mistaken for a real weapon, with the choice of colour. If on the other hand it's only one neighbour who could possibly see into your back garden, then I'd simply chat to them and tell em you are painting up a toy gun to shoot in your back garden, so it is obvious that you are not gearing up for a bank raid or armageddon.

Most of the sights you see on airsoft weapons might look like the real deal, but very few actually are, they are usually cheaper knockoffs. As you point out - real military scopes are calibrated for the range of the real weapons they are intended to be used with (which is probably three to four times the range that a typical airsoft weapon is likely to be engaging at, so would be fairly pointless on an airsoft weapon, and, they are prohibitively expensive compared to a knockoff copy with the correct calibration. For example, a surplus Warsaw Pact PSO-1 scope is going to be a few hundred quid at least, whereas I got a knock off copy of one to put on my airsoft SVD Dragunov which has the same reticule engravings as the real PSO-1, but calibrated for airsoft ranges. That cost less than fifty quid, which is just as well, because even the open sights on an SVD are calibrated for 1,200 metres, so a genuine scope for it would be useless. So why am I pointing this out? The fact that a Chinese company has gone to the trouble of making a replica PSO-1 scope specifically for an airsoft SVD Dragunov sniper rifle, tells us a couple things worth noting: That airsofters will certainly pay for an alternative version of some military kit which looks authentic, even if it isn't actually that authentic. So there is a market there for the right product, but, people don't want to pay too much for that gear, and are probably more concerned with the look of stuff - i.e. the 'pose value' of it - rather than an exact replication of the functionality. Where PMR radios are concerned, yes they aren't generally as sturdy as military equipment, nor do they have the range and sophistication of it either. But let's be honest, when we are dressing up as toy soldiers to run about with our toy guns, we are not going to be contacting a Forward Air Controller in a USAF OV-10 Bronco orbiting thirty miles away from us, so he can direct a napalm strike on Milton Keynes, and we are not going to die if our radios go U/S, so they are a useful aid, but nowhere near as critical as they are in real military operations. So a PMR radio is generally enough for what we need. But airsofters are still going to want that PMR to at least look authentic when they are using it, so really, about the only requirement for most airsofters, would be stuff like Bowman and Liberator headsets ready to plug into PMRs, because the PMR is likely to be stuffed in a tactical vest or webbing pocket somewhere. After all, I'm all for a bit of realism on my Vietnam soldier load out, but I don't want that quest for authenticity to extend to lugging a 25 pound AN/PRC-25 radio around on my back, when i can get that kind of look by simply having an H-250 handset with a polythene bag over it, plugged into a tiny PMR. Much of that stuff is available in replica form, but there are already people doing conversions of the real equipment commercially, so I'd look at undercutting those enterprises if I were you (since you said it was more of an interest than a means to keep a roof over your head), because in spite of the fact that airsofters don't want to pay a lot, I suspect they probably would pay a bit more (within reason) for a genuine headset which could be easily plugged into their PMR, knowing it wasn't going to fall to bits in a matter of weeks, especially if you were able to make it a bespoke service.

Welcome aboard. There are quite a lot of airsoft places nearby to you. Take a look at this map: http://airsoftodyssey.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/north-wests-airsoft-map.html