PureSilver

Scorpion EVO. I have actually ridden to a skirmish with a gun in a rucksack before, and no prizes for guessing which gun I chose for a game where I wasn't going to be able to bring a backup.

That's partially inaccurate. There is no minimum age limit to have a defence - if an 8-year-old played airsoft three times in two months at a site for which public liability insurance is held, he'd have the same defence as anyone else. The only differences are (a) he'd be too young to register that defence with UKARA, (b) because he's too young to buy any airsoft gun. As @Rogerborg says: There is nothing illegal about OP's father (over 18... I hope) purchasing an IF and gifting it to OP, OP playing (or having already played) his three games in two months to have a defence, and finally OP manufacturing a RIF by stripping the bright paint off his IF. As to whether or not this "person who doesn't have a defence purchasing a RIF to immediately gift to someone who does" is legitimate... I think there's an argument to be made that it could be. PatrolBase need to be able to show that they made the gun available for the purposes of airsoft, and if they know OP has a defence and but-for being a minor would be able to purchase a RIF himself, I think they could say that they made it available for that purpose. Whether or not they will do that - and I strongly suspect they won't - is up to them.

Might be worth keeping an eye out for a Hephaestus Project T, I think that was well-regarded.

If you put 11.1V through a TM AEP it will explode. AEPs are fragile, aftermarket and factory parts support is very poor, and their tiny air volume means it's challenging even to get 1J out of them, if I recall correctly. There's a reason people are prepared to pay ridiculous amounts of money to convert them to HPA - they just don't work very well as electric guns. If you want the best electric MP7 on the market - which is not a high bar, the AEPs are really not very good - get a VFC "AEG", make sure you always keep your batteries at a decent level of charge, and pray you never break an internal component. The VFC is externally very nice and has far better features and performance but (like the AEPs) it is a completely proprietary gearbox and aftermarket support is very limited. If it doesn't have to be an MP7, just a small SMG, there are much better guns that require far fewer compromises on the market. An ASG Scorpion EVO, an LCT EBB PP-19-01, some kind of MP5 or MP5K-PDW, even small SBRs - there are tons of options. The TM GBB is probably the best of the GBBs from a performance perspective, but it's about 0.9:1 scale and obviously fully ABS. The KSC/KWA is also too small and cracks its receivers. The VFC has a poor reputation for performance and reliability. The WE's unlicensed clone thing ("New Wave Small Rice") likewise, but at least it's cheap. Again, if it doesn't have to be MP7-shaped there are better options on the market; an ASG MP9 or GHK G5 would be compelling alternatives in this price range and size category.

I split between my ruinously expensive TM SOPMOD and my downright affordable EVO3A1. When it comes to OOTB AEGs I firmly believe the ASG Scorpion EVO3A1 is by a country mile the best gun available - possibly the best OOTB airsoft gun on the market at present, full stop. Yes on the new ones they cheaped out on the gears, but for the money it's basically impossible to get such a compelling combination of handling, sturdiness, performance, reliability and interactivity. These things were sub-£300 from Patrolbase for years, when the VFC MP7 - which while very cool is deeply flawed - debuted at £450 (since dropped to £400ish) and the Krytac Vector, inferior in basically every respect except being Vector shaped, remains £450. I can't sing the EVO's praises loudly enough: it is a spectacularly good gun. That said, I don't think there's a single other product I want to buy from ASG, because ASG don't even make it, VFC do. When it comes to not OOTB AEGs I equally firmly believe the TM NGRS SOPMOD or HK416 is the best AEG platform on the market. You get the best overall design, but to get it to the build quality of an LCT you're going to spend many hundreds of pounds on new plastics, a steel outer barrel, a revamp of the gearbox, a Spectre or Titan... The AR-pattern NGRS is the best design on the market in the same way that the TM G17 is (at present) the best G17 design on the market - it's a great design, but you really don't want to buy something built in ABS when you can get it in nylon GFP and aluminium and steel. If cost is no object for an AEG, I would always recommend a and-the-kitchen-sink AR-pattern NGRS. That said, there isn't a single other AEG I would buy from TM, because... This. I'll never buy a gun that's made of zinc alloy where it should be steel ever again. There are too many great options on the market and more on the way - just look at LCT's EBBR HK33s - to mess around with fragile ARs with aluminium outer barrels.

I agree completely with this. There must be tens if not hundreds of thousands of B6s out there; it is one of the most common hobby battery chargers. The law of averages demands that eventually at least one (even one of the real ones) is going to go up in smoke and take someone’s garage with it. With such a small sample size we don’t know whether the charger or the battery caused the fire; even the victim isn’t entirely sure. If a battery blew up on me I would always assume I had mis-set the charger or let a cell drop into DDS, both factors that are known to cause charging fires, rather than blaming the charger. I’m not saying the charger wasn’t at fault - see above comment on the law of averages - but LiPo charging fires almost always start in the comparatively volatile battery as a result of a mis-set charger, DDS or an internal short. Bluntly the bloke’s garage burning down would have happened regardless of the cause of the battery igniting; once it was lit, it was going up - no charger could possibly make the situation worse at that point. This is a salutary lesson in exercising extreme caution when charging LiPos in close proximity to other extremely flammable things like model aircraft and associated materials. While we can all take that valuable reminder to use fire-safe pouches and storage and supervise batteries while charging, I’d hesitate to get alarmist about this. In more than a decade of airsoft I’ve never seen a battery fire nor, to my knowledge, had one happen to any friend or teammate. Plenty of them have used B6AC-type chargers from various manufacturers for longer than I’ve been playing. While I have absolutely no doubt B6s fail, I see no evidence of any inherent flaw, or any reason to assume a different charger type would automatically be any more immune to manufacturing defects and/or neglectful or careless owners and/or damaged batteries than a genuine B6 V2 would be. That doesn’t by any means mean a genuine B6AC V2 is the be-all and end-all of chargers, nor that we shouldn’t find a more modern replacement, but I wouldn’t start yelling through a megaphone in the safe zone about the risk the B6 in particular poses to everyone’s garages.

LCT have an MP5 coming soon-ish (it's in their catalogue as coming soon) which will almost certainly be available with their EBB gearboxes, which are pretty brutal. You don't get the usual TM refinements (stop on empty, bolt lock/release) but you will get a stamped steel receiver and decent plastics, which you absolutely won't with any future NGRS. If you don't want to wait they have HK33s with the same gearbox out more or less right now; if they make a HK53 that would accept the same SureFire fore-end as the MP5.

@AK47frizzle is spot on. You can get replica EBR chassis for the WE M14 from $450 for the chassis alone up to $1,400 for a fully upgraded gun, but the only AEG conversion kits I'm aware of were the rare, long out of production and eye-wateringly expensive G&P kits for the TM-and-clone M14s. You're going to be better off buying a whole new AEG that comes with the chassis. The good ones are the G&Gs from about $500 on up, the cheap ones are the CYMAs from about $225 on up.

In descending order of annoyance: Unsafe play, especially blind fire, but also overkill. Coming round a blind corner pre-firing, dumping 10rds into someone at close range, is totally unnecessary; I came to play airsoft, not indulge your sadomasochistic fantasies. Included in this is high-RPS builds, especially DSGs and high-power/high-RPS HPA. If you need 40RPS to play, maybe you should take up something more your speed, like knitting. Dickhead play, especially not calling hits, but also hit-calling, offensive chat and getting aggressive. If you want to be a big man, fuck off down to Legoland and pick on people your own intellectual capacity. Marshals turning their safety brief into an interminable comedy set. Tell us the rules and let us play. Also... This. If I want to pay too much money to get touched up by a sweating mouth-breather, I'll go to a strip club. What makes this so unacceptable is if you do ask them, 99% of airsofters would talk your ear off about their kit and positively force you to pick it up and aim down the sights etc. so you can appreciate its majesty. There's no need to go messing around with people's kit, especially when some players are leaving the value of a used car lying around in an unsecured safe zone based on nothing but trust.

I'd be aiming for 75-80% of UK retail. The M9A1 retails for about £140 in the UK, so I'd be looking for £105-115. The E2 retails for about £125, so I'd be looking for £95-100.

This is basically it for me. I can't see the point in having 5-10 guns that are all functionally identical (I don't mean "they all shoot 6mm BBs", I mean "they're all bog-standard AEG assault rifles") and also less well-made then they could be, when I could have 2-4 guns that are really incredible. You can only use a handful of guns (it's a ball-ache even to bring more than a handful to a skirmish) when you play, so why would you have a less good gun in your hands in exchange for two more in the car, or more likely at the back of the cupboard at home? I've sold virtually all my horrifically expensive "collector" pistols and eaten massive losses, and sold all my basic AEGs. What I have now is basically one of each type of gun, each highly upgraded: AEG SMG (EVO3A1), AR (NGRS), LMG and DMR; GBB pistols, SMG and AR; HPA BASR. It's the maximum I can justify - one of each role. I'm also now operating a strict one-in one-out policy to try to avoid the accumulation of yet more very expensive toys. I've just picked up a cheap project too. It's definitely more fun to mess around with a pistol that cost me £70 than one that cost me £700.

I aspire to one day enjoy a job as much as Marui Man enjoys his.

Likewise. Overpowered pyro adds nothing to the game but tinnitus and scorch marks, and also obliges every other player to spend money on and endure the discomfort of over-ear ear protection. We came to play airsoft, not competitive cumulative hearing loss. Years back at a now-closed indoor site some tryhard threw a GR20 (a training/operational stun grenade that doesn't belong in an airsoft game at all) which landed more or less at my feet in a narrow corridor. Since I thought it was a Mk.5 in some kind of replica case, and since it had me dead to rights, I just dropped my gun on its sling and started to put my hands over my ears, but it detonated before they got there. The concussion was so bad it almost knocked me over - I was completely deaf for about 30-60 seconds and couldn't hear properly for hours afterwards. A marshal who was about 15 feet away was visibly disorientated too and in some short words told the player that it was going to stay in a box in the safe zone for the rest of the day and he was lucky not to be joining it. I agree with @hitmanNo2. I'd be happy to do that with a timed grenade with the pin pulled but the spoon held, or an impact with .209 or .380 shells, but not with an impact with a 12-gauge firework in it.

And all you had to do to save the cash was undercut the actual inventor and stifle innovation. Bargain! Those clones are the reason that we never got factory-supported magazine adaptors and it took 5 years and counting for new models to come to market. If they'll continue to prioritise the cheapest possible product at the expense of innovation and quality, airsofters really have no-one but themselves to blame when they get sold shitty, obsolete products that don't work properly out of the box or break shortly thereafter. It's not a coincidence that in 1995 a mobile phone looked like this and in 2020 looks like this, but a 2020 M4 AEG gearbox looks exactly the same as a 1995 one. It's not a coincidence that local airsoft retailers are going out of business (especially in the States) because people would rather save a paltry amount of money than support any actual customer service. It's not a coincidence that Magpul withdrew from their partnership with PTS in disgust and as a result we can't get PDR-Cs or FPGs any more. There is a direct link between people forcing manufacturers into a race to the bargain basement and manufacturers not having any incentive to make innovative products. The "I would never pay £x for x, so they haven’t lost a sale by me purchasing a rip-off" argument sucked when it applied to pirating music, films and videogames and it sucks here. People buying it is the reason it’s produced. The entitlement of "I want it, but I don’t want to pay for it" is frustrating. It apparently cost TM $1m in 2008 dollars to develop the NGRS system; how are they supposed to recoup the first significant investment in AEG design since they invented the AEG if consumers set an arbitrary limit of "no more than twice the cost of a bargain basement clone of your old gun"? It’s especially irritating with straight clones like the M12 because the clone literally doesn’t do even one single thing better than the original, except be cheap and poorly made. Even CYMA have improved over TM in important ways like having metal receivers. I fully support and will buy things that obviously borrow heavily from an existing design if it’s improved - I’ll happily buy an VFC, because even though it’s mostly a TM clone they’ve massively improved it by making it steel and wood rather than plastic and plastic. This is all far from unique to the Sidewinder, it’s just especially annoying because it’s not the property of some huge faceless corporation. It’s literally one guy who designed an amazing product, put in a truly astonishing amount of his own money and time developing it, getting it manufactured, dealing it to distributors etc., and all so it could get ripped off and sold for profit by massive companies inside six months. At this stage it’s hard to tell if we deserve innovation. Anyway, apologies for dragging the thread off topic.

Shame. Odin is a one-man band developing awesome, innovative products. He quit airsoft product development for about five years after people took his brilliant design and immediately cloned it so cheapskates could save themselves £20. I have absolutely no doubt that this sort of thing contributes to the generally stagnant nature of airsoft technology. Really? I wouldn't have thought iWholesales would sell fakes, but I've been wrong before. They're certainly priced like the real thing.

I mean £565 plus £100-160 equals £665-725, and £500 is 75% of £665 and 69% of £725. 70-75% of RRP for a gun with less than one bottle of BBs through it isn't even all that high, although I would probably expect to receive more like 65-70% simply based on how much returns diminish after £400. I think you might also be forgetting to factor in the high cost of quality accessories which are usually included with NGRS packages. Taking this Delta as an example: Gun ~£550 Grip ~£20 Magazines ~£25ea. ODIN M12 Sidewinder ~£50 (assuming it's genuine, and I'm not sure there are tan fakes) IMAX B6 ~£35 Four batteries ~£50 That's £880, of which the £500 asking price is 57%. If he split the magazines, speedloader and charger off as separate items he'd be asking the equivalent of £341 for the gun and the batteries, which I would describe as "acutely reasonable".

Waiting on a regulator and other CO2 components, but hopefully I’ll start to have answers early next year. I’ll update the thread when I do. They’re not really intended to be a sniper’s scope, but I’ve found G&P’s ACOGs to have very superior glass compared to other airsoft-grade sights. I’ve had a couple of clone Leupold 3.5-10x40 Mk.IVs and compared to those my old G&P 4x32 really was extremely nice. 4x is really all you’ll need in airsoft (you'll miss faffing with adjustable magnification and focus a lot less than you think you will), you don't get the fish-eye that seems endemic to airsoft-grade adjustable-magnification scopes, and the sight is extremely compact and basically indestructible. They're heavy and the eye relief is unforgiving, but they’re really good optically. I replaced my G&P with a real TA01NSN, and while the Trijicon is a lot nicer and has things the G&P didn't (like tritium illumination) the G&P was excellent and entirely adequate for airsoft. G&P make a few different models; I had GP-035 - pretty much the most basic one. £85 for the sight, plus £7.50 for a polycarbonate lens and £7.50 for a killflash to put the lens in gives you an extremely rugged and high-quality BB-proofed optic for £100 - not bad. If I recall correctly a VisionKing shortdot is about £60 plus the mount and a lens protector, so there's probably only £20ish in it. If you want to see how the ACOG looks on the shortest possible SRS, let me know - I can get a picture of mine.

I have a PDI in my Fast Hop G-Spec with the FOW nub and drop-in R-hop patch. I’ve barely had a chance to try it but it does all fit together.

Mach Sakai's video is worth a watch with the auto-translated subtitles on, (a) because of hilarious mistranslations and (b) because you get to see just how well-thought out the gun seems to be. I still wouldn't buy one, but it looks like a very nice piece of kit.

IIRC for some reason the Hephaestus (really expensive) was based on the S&T (cheap and really nasty) Tavor bodyshell rather than the Ares (really nice), even though the two were functionally identical since S&T are basically the bargain-basement offshoot of Ares. I always thought it was weird that it was that way around - maybe Ares refused to sell them just the furniture and they didn't feel like paying for a $400 gun just to throw three quarters of it away.

Americans, apparently. aardrummer's "Support Gunner's Bible" (if you can find it anywhere, it's been years since I've seen it online) goes into eye-watering detail about what's required to keep up very high volumes of fire for long periods of time. A lot of the things Recoil Shocks have - zinc gears, plastic pistons, plastic bushings - are just not suitable for that kind of abuse. Your G&P likely shipped with steel gears, a part-steel piston and steel bushings or bearings (it varied between production runs), and even with those the V2 gearbox was still considered very inferior to the CA-style M249-specific 'box for heavy-duty use. This just doesn't hold up. TM make mistakes just like everybody else, and there are guns that come out of the box either already malfunctioning or doomed to do so very shortly. Non-G-Spec VSR-10s were (are?) notorious for hooking right, Mk.23 magazines bleed gas and Five-seveN catches erode every time you put a magazine in. There absolutely are NGRS that arrived fatally flawed: AK-74MNs were so chronically unreliable Marui literally stopped making them for several years. There are a number of TM guns where "just wait until it breaks" is bad advice. Preventative work will significantly extend the life of Glocks (epoxy pot the front frame post, otherwise get ready to buy a new frame), Five-seveNs (secure the hop-up unit or it will destroy the outer barrel, secure the BBU or it will destroy the slide) and other models besides. This absolutely does apply to NGRS: just by way of example, if you don't loctite (or preferably replace) the castle nut on AR-pattern Recoil Shocks they can work free and then eat the buffer tube threads. Saying you don't have to upgrade or replace until something breaks is true but also totally meaningless; on that basis literally anything from anyone that fires out of the box is good to go until it isn't. Yes, a gun will continue to function until one of those things happens, but that doesn't mean it's functioning well. Take the QD battery system which afflicts almost all AR-pattern Recoil Shocks. You would have to be absolutely certifiable to pay £39.00 (or more - Wolf want a scarcely believable £52.99) per battery for obsolete and low-capacity 1,300mAh 8.4V NiMHs. You would also have to endure years of lacklustre performance and semi-auto lockups at low voltages, and wear out numerous costly batteries, while you waited for something in the harness to wear or break to justify "upgrading" to modern batteries. To bring this back to the Mk.46, my point is that noting that zinc gears, plastic pistons and plastic bushings are not a recipe for long-lived support guns - especially not recoil support guns - isn't hating on TM, it's just simple common sense. If people actually use these as support weapons, we're going to see either TM finally adopting things everybody else adopted decades ago (e.g. steel gears, steel-tooth pistons and steel bushings) or a lot of broken guns.

If this is like other Recoil Shocks it has plastic bushings. Those are totally unacceptable on any AEG, let alone premium ones like NGRSs, but they're even less appropriate on a support gun which will be firing 10,000rds daily rather than annually. Have a look at what support gunners have to do to keep their guns running for a thousand rounds an hour. TM have never made a support gun before. Either a lot of things about this are going to be different from their regular guns, or it's going to need a lot of work to keep it working.

From what I can recall, the ferrous metals rules only apply to handguns - Recoil Shocks have metal bodies and there's apparently a roaring trade in WE handguns in Japan. Japanese manufacturers in general have been appallingly slow to update their materials, although we're starting to see things like factory-applied CeraKote finishes on TM GBBRs. I reckon a custom EBB gearbox of some sort with a heavy recoil weight (maybe based around the LCT steel piston) in a DX G&P M249 would definitely be the best of both worlds. Recoil Shocks with a £100 FCU (that is light years ahead of the PTW's) have all of those features, except 1:1 construction, that are unambiguously advantageous. Plus they have recoil, and are available in a variety of shapes at half the cost or less. An ASG Scorpion EVO has cycle completion, 1:1 construction (far more realistic materials than the PTW's, too), stop-on-empty and bolt lock/release and a different hop-up and those are £300. The £1k plus you spend on a PTW also gets you a design that hasn't advanced noticeably since the early 2000s, questionable factory electronics, unexceptional materials and eye-wateringly expensive upgrades, the latter exacerbated by it being seemingly common to spend hundreds of pounds more immediately after purchase getting the gun set up by a professional. PTWs were leagues ahead when they were the only ones with those features, but the beginning of the end for that dominance was the release of the SOPMOD more than 10 years ago now. The intervening 10 years gave us a further 26 (soon to be 27) NGRSs, ERGs, other more realistic AEGs (e.g. the equally flawed DAS), and a wide range of far more reliable and realistic GBBRs. I'm far from an expert, but I believe in the last decade Systema's only major innovation was a PTW with much worse recoil than an NGRS and battery magazines. For this you were expected to cough up $2,400 for the gun and $145 per magazine... I'm not begrudging anybody their choice of gun and nobody has to justify their choices to anybody else. That doesn't mean that in the age of the Recoil Shock and modern GBBR the PTW isn't an increasingly obsolete platform.

I think it would be more accurate to describe TM's plastics as "inadequate for a £500+ gun". It's crazy that they still think ABS is acceptable on guns this expensive, especially when an $80 WE is all GFP. It's particularly bad on the SCARs and G36 NGRSs because those are almost entirely plastic on the outside and it is extremely difficult or completely impossible to replace it. This is kind of the issue I'll have with the Mk.46, too. I know they spent a ton of money on it and I don't think the price is unreasonable, but I'm not paying £1,100+ for an aluminium gun when it should be made of steel. Especially not when G&P can make a steel one for literally half the price, and very especially not when it should be possible to hack together some kind of recoil for the G&P with the £550 left over. It's the same issue with the NGRS AKs: I don't think the price is unreasonable, but I'm not paying £500+ for an aluminium gun when I will shortly be able to get a steel LCT with similar recoil for 75% of the price.