TheFull9

I'm deployed atm so no online gaming, but I managed to bring my laptop and cludge-bodge together a table so I'm working through a ton of old stuff (6-10 years) that I got for pennies in steam sales over the years but never got around to back home. Most pleasant surprise by far has been Timeshift, super solid FPS gameplay, cool mechanics and enemies, nice little RPG elements for a linear FPS and a story that you feel should be cliche yet actually just seems to work really well. Also Fallout 3 quality presentation of lore and backstory in the world, really good.

Loved the first 2, bought both around release. Just super solid FPS gameplay and for me they hit that sweet spot between arcade and sim where you're somewhat easy to kill (if you don't keep your eyes peeled) don't have a ton of ammo and you have little jobs to do like wind up your light source/don respirator etc but without there being any boring tedium. No idea what the real story is with Epic, but the fact Exodus has even more customisation and detail to the weapons and gear than previous titles makes me pretty sure I'll enjoy this game. Will be purchased quite soon.

For a long time now the topic of streaming replacing everything else that came before has been something that interested me immensely. You'd have thought music would've been the first thing given it requires the least bandwidth, but I'd say it probably happened to films first (and many tv series ofc) when blockbuster gradually died followed by netflix growing massive. Physical CDs did perhaps die first but for a while people were torrenting and buying music to download and keep, but that has been/is now being surplanted by spotify, deezer and amazon etc. Now nobody's buying discs with anything on in shops anymore, 'but I do, I like having something physical!' nobody cares grandad stop wasting resources for absolutely no reason. Games were the last stand because they require the biggest investment in terms of the servers given the fact you control a game (unlike video and audio) and for a large number of potential customers around the world to have stable, high bandwidth connections (faster than is needed for streaming other stuff). However it was an inevitability, a lot of other computer programs already went 'to the cloud'. Google was probably the biggest and most significant game stream announcement at E3 but there was also Bethesda and Microsoft in the mix and those are 3 gigantic names just off the top of my head. I tried PS Now on my PC about 2 years ago, managed to play through The Last of Us fairly well, resolution would dip down sometimes, occasional minor input lag, but it worked and that system didn't have nearly the investment put in to Stadia (plus internet connections on military bases universally suck ass). At £8/month or whatever it is with all games on the system included, the cost vs a PC or console and buying even a few games per year is much less and you never have to update your hardware, until it physically dies that is. ~£100/year for Stadia would be a monstrous cost saving for me personally given that gaming is by far my main hobby and pastime. Personally, I think these services may well take off and if they do the ramifications for the actual hardware of consoles and gaming PCs could be huge. It might take a console gen worth of years for a plurality of people to make the change, but if these things work and the game selections available on them are good then the price point is too good to pass up for most people playing traditional games (i.e. not mobile).

Hm.. partly, there's plenty of companies out there with solid revenue streams from mainstream products who still never do anything different and play it safe. I've handled the Cobalt AEG at SHOT, frankly if they made mags for it that were super-resilient to drops I'd buy one as I love the real thing, but I don't think it's a gun that'd have any use in airsoft outside of IPSC and other similar style airsoft shooting competitions.

My SUPREME apologies for the offence caused. Never seen your shooter tbh mate, is there an airsoft AR 1-piece lower made of plastic? Did you import a faxon handguard? I nearly have a few times. On the one hand I understand your analogy for aiming/high optics etc, but the thing has no recoil and weighs bugger all so you can just hold it up to your eye. Unless trying to cheek against the standard issue Dye mask causes it to slip around while running and you need an anchor point in the shoulder? I'm entirely open to ideas on that side of things. This adaption is safer I'd agree, but given all the risky releases I've seen in the past 14 or so years I disagree that no company would ever attempt to make a pure competition type gun.

The one aspect I genuinely don't understand is the hinge point for the stock being lower down than on any other similar weapon and the fact it folds down, but only part way because then the pistol grip stops it. No idea if there's some aspect of speedsoft that makes it desirable. Then again if you want a gun this unrealistic I don't really get why you'd not just design something from the ground up that's has nothing to do with any real firearm but is cheap and easy to make with plenty of room inside to allow for easier performance increase, bigger mags/faster reloads etc. At this point in a guns' transformation in to a pure competitive implement there's no reason to hang on to the realistic appearance of the AR it began with. I know that G&G are already turning out loads of AR bits so its' easy in that sense which is probably why these guns exist, but they should definitely make them IFs instead of RIFs for the UK market.

Apart from the above it's only really been the electric realm doing this so far. G&G are/will be doing a pistol where you can swap the slide for an entire carbine kit type deal, no idea on mag type though. Closest equivalent I can think of right now would be the KJW 10/22, rifle size gun with pistol sized magazines. You need a much smaller and lighter bolt for an airsoft GBB to work with pistol mags versus the gas capacity of rifle sized mags in a GBB AR. I suppose if you break it down the issue is people either want an 'experience' or they want performance. GBB M4s can offer some of the former, AEGs the latter, a gas pistol mag carbine won't have either the recoil experience of GBBRs or the performance (consistency, cold resistance, high capacity) of an electric gun. My personal experience has been that some TM gas pistols in standard pistol format shoot further and more accurately than a lot of the low budget/poorly maintained AEGs on any given field and obviously the pistol is tiny by comparison. I tried a pistol carbine kit once with a 1911 inside and a normal 1911 on my hip, ended up just using the normal handgun. The FPS is already around 320 with propane and what little range/accuracy you might gain with a much longer barrel can be negligible, whereas you might lose a fair bit in terms of moving fast in tight spaces. Also if you're limited to that small mag capacity then at least you have maximum manoeuvrability with the pistol.

What Would Stoner Do - Airsoft edition.

People have said multiple times in here to only wear the patches in game and nowhere else, why would you be wearing them in your garden? If you want to try on the rest of the loadout or take pictures out there or whatever, then literally just take the velcro patches off if you have multiple overlooking neighbours who really twitch their curtains.

Over the years I've lost count given how many hundreds of police/sas/marine commando patches I've seen on airsofters at games who are none of the above (not to mention just about every army regiment patch, raf and navy stuff etc etc etc). I think absolute 'worst case' you would maybe take them off for any IG posting on your own accounts and the like, but even then that's playing it very safe.

Certainly nobody here is saying ignorance is an excuse, far from it. Ignorance is just the fact of the matter, there's no basic training for airsoft. The bar for entry is having a bit of money (comparatively small amount in comparison to some hobbies) and the ability to get to a skirmish site and shoot a rif.

Glad to hear this is finally happening some places. I don't think its' quite as epidemic an issue as some people imply given the sheer numbers of G&G combat machines out there, but when it comes to the less common weapons (non-electric ones especially) I think there will be a fair few folks who are either straight cheating or so ignorant of the basic science they don't even realise they're shooting at excessive muzzle energies.

Rgr, to be honest I've never looked for one, there may be like.. single figured, in public hands (at a guesstimate) but they're probably owned by the sort of people who collect quite rabidly and never let things go.. not that I'm one to talk 🤣 But anyway you'd need to start scouring places that are very specific to real british militaria. Sadly I don't have any recommendations right now but I'd imagine there are groups on FB for people who collect the parts and accessories for SLRs and L85s that can be legally owned (mags, BFAs, bayonets etc). Maybe also groups for collectors of de-acs and for people who do reenactment.

By rail do you mean the handguard B&T did in crazy-small numbers?