BrightCandle

My own Chronograph has recently been about 10% low for some unknown reason. It used to be agreeing with the sites but now its just decided to be quite a bit wrong, new batteries did not fix it. I don't know why they go like this but its not even as if one particular model with clean batteries always works consistently.

It certainly wont be the last bit of gear you buy that isn't much use!

The blackviper G36 if it at least meets its specs is potentially skirmish able, an fps of 280-320 is under powered but not ridiculously so. I suspect its accuracy and other capabilities are not great and it might impact your enjoyment of the games but its not as bad as some of the guns people buy before they first go play a game. I wouldn't personally recommend it as a first gun, you need to spend about £100 to get anything skirmish worthy and JG/G&G/ICS all do reasonable guns in that sort of price range that are fine (I would personally recommend the G&G more than the JG based on the components). My recommendation is always just go and play and rent your equipment. Rental stuff is OK and it will be competitive and also avoid sunk costs when you don't know if you will enjoy the sport, its usually the cheapest way to get to UKARA and hence be able to avoid two tone guns. When I did it my rental onsite was £30 a game so it turned out to be cheaper to buy a two tone but that isn't all that normal. The JG G36C if its listed as 350 fps is more than likely going to come below that, but order it over the phone and get them to test it and confirm its below the limits with their chronograph before sending it. This is a common concern for airsofters and mostly the issue is shops shipping guns at 300-310 fps and hence being too low rather than being too high. Almost every airsoft AEG sold in the UK is below 350 fps by default so its not a big worry and not one you'll have for two months anyway at this point.

I can't justify going much above 25 rps, its well into the realm of amazing trigger response and frankly ought to be the limit. I think this is going to be one of those growing areas of concern over the years and eventually sites are going to start to choose a maximum RPS around this sort of number, which is still 2x that of most real weapons.

Bought: Patrolbase When: Februrary 2016 Skirmish time: 1.5 hours! I have had the gun a week, skirmished it once so I likely haven't found all the potential issues with it. But I needed to at least start writing about the gun as there are a couple of gotchas that people ought to know and I'll fill in a fuller review once I have more experience with the hop and other aspects. Gotcha 1: It only works with Tmags from ICS. I tried EPMs, Mag brand and G&G midcaps and none of them fit let alone feed. The problem is that the gun requires a shorter area for the spring at the top that holds the BBs in, normal mags have a much larger area on them and hence this gun is incompatible with basically all magazines other than ICS that I have seen. So the question is whether the T Mag is any good? In a word no its not. The spring in it is very weak and it can only lift a 0.2g BB. With 0.25g (ASG is what I used) you will have feeding issues. I can't get it to reliably feed out anything heavier at all, it wont even push the BBs out. It is the weakest spring I have seen in a magazine so far. With 0.2g BBs it seems pretty reliable and can feed full auto just fine. Gotcha 2: The battery compartment is a bit short. At first appearance you can get a stick lipo in the rear of the guns stock but when you go to put the butt on you find that (1) some of that stock goes inside the buffer tube like area reducing the space you have and its awkward to get the wires and battery in there as the space is kind of small even with just a 1450mah battery and (2) that its only as long as the buffer if you don't shorten the rifle below its 4th position. So if you want a normal length lipo in there you can't move the stock in much before it'll stop moving. Gotcha 3: When you put the gun onto safe it will decock the spring, the next time you go into semi and pull the trigger you will get two rounds come out. If your field requires semi fire this is going to be an issue. I have also received one that has an FPS of 260, so it needs a new spring. That is more about patrolbase than the gun but its really low.

My T4-18 had similar issues. My most recent game the gears stripped, the gearbox is cracked and its only about its 6th game. I had the gun break after all but one of those games and now the cost of repair is just kind of ludicrous. I have hated this gun since the beginning with its feed issues, then its charging handle and its moset all the way up to the darn thing ripping itself apart. My gun was utter garbage and I am binning what remains, none of it is well made from the outside or the inside its all just a very expensive bit of junk. I wont be buying or recommending a G&G top tech and I haven't since I got it.

Okto is intending to run April, June and October? Awesome.

Quite a few of these games ago Vendetta via Templar Mike were looking for players on these forums. I joined as a result of that advertisement by a fellow player and booked my travel and hotels. Then about 2 weeks before the game the leadership of the team fell apart and started saying they couldn't make it and the team just kind of crumbled away. In the end I had a go or no go moment about 3 days before the event after which I couldn't cancel hotel/travel and in the end pulled out as the team was in disarray. I ended up loosing deposits for a bundle of things but figured I was better off than having bad weekend with an outnumbered team and no leadership for what is a regular every month game. I have no idea how it usually goes or what the game is like since I haven't gone back, I just know not to trust team Vendetta's leadership to turn up and the last drive they had for players obviously went pretty badly for me. I wouldn't thus join or recommend team Vendetta for obvious reasons. Hopefully they have sorted themselves out by now but I vowed back then to at least tell people this happened the next time they advertised in the forums so there were consequences to recommending a game they abandoned.

If you know the MOA of the sights windage and elevation you can predict the initial movement fairly reliably. 1 MOA is 27.5mm at 100 metres (or 1 inch at 100 yards). So at a 10 metre target 1MOA worth of movement is 2.75 millimetres. So based on that you can turn the turret the appropriate amount to cover the distance its wrong both horizontally and vertically and it should come pretty much centre with a single adjustment and then its fine tuning if its a little off. Not all sights come with a specification for how much a click will produce in movement, but you can estimate it yourself with taking say 10 clicks and seeing how far it goes and thus based on 1 MOA = 2.75 millimetres estimate it. Then you can do the adjustment. Its worth knowing the turrent click in MOA. My bushnell for example is 1/4 MOA per click, many cheaper sights are more like 1 MOA per click.

I lot of events seem to be like that. I recall asking questions about the National Airsoft event and got absolutely nothing back from the organisers. It seemed pretty reasonable to be wanting an iternary for the Friday considering there was no play scheduled until dusk that day so I could assess if I should be there in the morning or evening and they never responded. I ended up not going because they didn't answer. Don't go is my advice, any organiser that isn't going to answer basic logistics questions about encampment etc before the game starts isn't going to be running a well organised event.

January last year I played a game in -5C with 60mph bursts of wind. It wasn't fun and involved 7 layers and I never felt warm the whole day. The site was also terrible. Last weekend however I took both a Ubacs and underarmour thermal shirt and camo top and ended up wearing the UBACs. The cross over point for me seems to be around 10C but everyone is different and I tend to prefer it colder than most people.

The battery will not increase FPS. 235 suggests something is severely wrong, that isn't just spring settling or the seal dried out its most likely a damage part. Gun needs to come apart and the hop, nozzle and then potentially the cylinder head/piston head all need checking for damage

Yep the gen 3. Was awful accuracy from the beginning and pieces have just been falling off it from day 1. So many different issues I can't be bothered to list them all but I would be surprised if people didn't run into at least some of the problems I had like the magazine well shape and charging handle issues.

My opinion remains you don't know you hit someone until they call hit, those are the rules after all. So you have to keep firing until you see that arm and hear that call. This is a vital part of the basic rules of the game, because we can't and shouldn't be calling others out that is just as bad and a much larger more prevalent problem. I have seen a lot of these toxic idiots calling others out when they were clearly missing and thankfully the sites I frequent deal with these guys quickly as they destroy the day for everyone. I treat all the other players on the field as I would wish to be treated, as honest adults. As such if I shoot and they don't call hit and they hit me I am call it and walk to respawn. If I get hit and I am not sure if its a ricochet I call it and walk off, that happens a lot in the green zone in billericay and I suspect some of my opponents are going for those types of kills on purpose but even so I call it anyway because I'll be damned if I am going to be a problem for someone else. When they get caught doing it and it will happen its them that wont be playing on that site anymore not me. If a BB comes out of another players gun and hits me I am hit, whether I believed they were out of the game or not is irrelevant, they didn't call out so they were in the game and it really is that simple and those are the rules. Separate to this I might obviously tell a Marshall what happened, describe the incident and describe the individual involved so they can check him out, all cheaters are going to get caught eventually and its the Marshall's job to ensure the game is being played fairly and it frees me from trying to deal with something I can't deal with without assaulting or battering someone anyway. I have even told a Marshall where the guys welt is before and that helps enormously to prove the point that he was hit and he felt it. So the way I view this video is Matt charges past a corner, shoots at a guy who doesn't call hit who then shoots Matt and then he does not take his hits. Matt cheated on purpose having called another player out. The other player probably decides he is cheating and starts exiting the area only to be shot and then ends up retaliating. Without that hit call from the person being shot Matt has no obvious indication at the time that anything other events happened, with hindsight and a video we can see the first player was hit but he didn't believe he was. Strangely enough Matt seems to have deleted the link on reddit, I might have got some downvotes but I was also the most upvoted post on there as well. People seem to think its OK to do this retaliatory shooting or to challenge the cheaters on their behavior or to then cheat in response when they cheat. None of that is OK. Matt has been banned from that site twice for cheating before he isn't exactly a saint and this video clearly shows what he is willing to do when he calls someone else out of the game. Alas the staff at the site don't care about this sort of behavior which is why it continues. Many people contacted me on reddit with complaints about Matt and his team mates after posting about his video, its kind of astonishing their reign of terror at that site continues. Just goes to show if you are a celebrity you can break the rules and get away with it repeatedly and not all airsoft sites are run well where cheaters are removed from play.

I should probably point out Amped airsoft did a review of the Smith optics goggles recently and showed that the battery compartment issue is not present on those ones, because it can be moved from the strap to somewhere else like your helment. That means it should be possible to get it out of the way for a Boonie. They highly recommended them, the entire team over at amped airsoft seem to now be using them which says they are probably pretty good. I am unfortunately yet to meet someone with the goggles in the safe zone however so haven't been able to directly compare with the Revisions but I am on the lookout for someone with them now as I would like to try them myself since it might solve my battery compartment placement issue for my Okto games (where I have to wear a Boonie).

The usual bad conduct from all involved unfortunately.

The G&P aimpoint replica that wolfarmouries sells is remarkable for £30. Mine did eventually fall apart but its the first sight I ever bought and its still working and its been decent the whole time. I wrote a review of it some time ago in the reviews section but frankly for £30 its quite impressive and I have had sights twice that price that have been utter garbage (a T1 that can't be zeroed and a Nuprol holo that is so brown its hard to see through!). I suspect its the best buy for a sight that you can get for airsoft especially since it can take a flash hider for £10 that can take quite a pounding from BBs before it needs replacing.

An ICS Ape to replace my truly awful CQB G&G T4-18 that decided to shred its gearbox as the final act of what has been a terrible gun that survived just 6 games and required repairs after every single one.

As far as I know (don't own an ICS but will do very soon) the gun needs to be put into safe or potentially the forward assist needs pressing to release the gear tension and set the gearbox into a state where it can be split and go back together. Its a problem particular to ICS and this split gearbox, the normal whole gear box has the other problem of pieces flying about when opened and its under tension! PS Long barrels != range or accuracy in airsoft. Lengthening the barrel for a DMR will also mean you need a new cylinder to match the air volume, you can't just do the look as it will impact performance of the gun and its accuracy to not match the air volume.

The first Nuprol's I used were simply fantastic, they were remarkably consistent and I instantly found a replacement for the bastards I used before, they were measurable better. However then they sourced them differently and I started having feeding issues and accuracy was awful. I dumped a whole load of Nuprol's, they were just plain faulty. I can't even get the 0.2s to feed well enough to use them for Chrono purposes, they are terrible. I would suspect this is why they have disappeared as the recent batches have destroyed their reputation.

Do the ICS T Mags lift .28/0.3g BBs OK?

I have an S&T Tar 21 professional and its been great. It needed some upgrades on the airseal and hop to really compete but its trucked along for about 50k rounds before it needed maintenance and that was a change of motor and piston. I think the main reason to avoid them is the difficulty in getting parts, it really is quite important when you don't have many guns that you don't end up searching for months looking for a part in random taiwan shops because its rare and not being able to play. There is nothing more frustrating than not getting out to play because the gun is broken and you can't find the part anywhere. So plan to have a nice reliable M4/AK in your arsenal just to make sure you always have something that works and is easy to repair. Once a part goes on your bullpup odds are its done for and just spare parts.

Your FPS is low and that will impact your range. You need to get that sorted. Getting the right length spring in an M110 is what you need to at least get close to the right FPS. Now the issue might also be that you have an airleak from the nozzle to the bucking, older guns can have stiff buckings that need replacing and the nozzle to the cylinder head may need a bit of silicon to help seal as well. Once you get it shooting at the right FPS and you have a new bucking in there then you can start to turn up the hop and see the trajectory and start to get a feel for accuracy. Right now what you have is too low FPS and no hop and so those just need fixing.

Anyone know where I can find a list of ICS gun magazine compatibility? Was considering picking up an APE (certainly a split gearbox ICS gun) but Khenseb showed my usual mags (EPMs and MAG) don't seem to work in it and I was wondering what it actually did work with other than ICS 45rnd mid caps and the high cap it comes with. Evike suggests TM and Matrix and ICS but there must be a list from someone somewhere. I guess I can ring fire support (they stock them here in the UK) to see what they think works with it but would be nice if there was a definite listed from the manufacturer as such wide incompatibility is an issue.

Amped airsoft recently did a review of the smith optics fan goggles and they look like they might have similar qualities to the Revision goggles. The advantage of the smith optics is the battery pack isn't attached to the strap so you can move it off onto a helmet and its higher voltage so you may find the fan can go faster. Can't personally vouch for the solution but its telling a whole bunch of the amped airsoft crew have been picking them up all last year and they are now all using them and doing a review after that time frame says a fair bit about how good they are.