BrightCandle

My radiers really didn't fog much at all tonight. Considering how cold it is in Epsom bunker and how hot and sweaty I was I was surprised to find they held up for an hour without any real issues with just some op drops and a clean between rounds. I was expecting a disaster but they are dramatically better down there than mesh googles (because its already insanely dark).

I am told the G&G hop up unit itself is pretty decent. The issue with its hop up, like most, is that it uses a relatively stiff bucking and a standard nub. A softer bucking (45 degrees maybe a little more) and a H nub would potentially make the hop more consistent. The barrel on the other hand is pretty standard affair in the G&G CM16, so a tighter precision barrel can certainly improve range at the cost of some accuracy. Its not entirely clear that either mod will necessarily improve anything, you may make things worse or gain no measurable performance at all.

Personally I would say don't upgrade anything yet. Get the gun, get familiar with its range and accuracy and generally how well it performs. Compare it to the other guns other people have brought with them, stock and customised and then determine what to do from there. What I am saying is don't change it yet, because what you have works pretty well out of the box. The biggest upgrades for range and accuracy are probably going to come from minor hop up adjustments in the beginning.

I chuck it all on the top shelf of my wardrobe. I keep most of it in the bags I take to skirmish so its quick to get out the door with it all ready. I just need to change into the trousers and shoes and I walk out the door with the pack and gun cover.

And if you get shot in the tooth it will chip it. If this discussion says anything is that we are all willing to take different levels of risk. Some of us don't mind loosing a tooth, some of us don't mind a chance at a BB fragment in the eye, some of us are happy to potentially loose an eye. We can draw a spectrum of potential risk from one end to the other here and the various trade offs we make at different kinds of risks. I don't think we need to legislate those risks away, we all pretty much sign a waiver every site we go to anyway since we are signing up to get shot with low powered firearms. The site ensures everyone doing so isn't doing anything illegal but beyond that its all our personal choice. But we have to be honest about what those risks are. Even Stanag 2420 for example on the Bolle glasses is 184 m/s BB strike, but at that speed its got a 50% chance of penetration. Does that mean a 150 m/s (500 fps sniper) has no chance or that it has a small one? I don't know and they don't have listings for 100% protection because presumably it doesn't exist. What the standard does give us though is a clear way to compare the products to each other and be confident its 'safe' for airsoft. Mesh doesn't have that and that bothers me. If I get my glasses and shoot at them to confirm they are good at defending me then they also perish as I do so since they only survive so many strikes. Standards are needed, anecdotal evidence like "I wear them and I have never been hit in the eye" isn't helpful, we need real scientific tests done to determine their limits.

My local sites are mostly 328 fps, and my closest is 328 +2%, so I really didn't have a lot of options I had to downgrade. Honestly you are better off not ever messing with the gun from stock if you can avoid it until such time as you know what your doing. I had to learn the tech before I wanted to. The range is the hop not in the FPS, remember that because its important!

Well I rang them and asked! Basically it does indeed come with a default G&G M100 spring. However the M100 upgrade they do is a 'better' spring, it produces a little more FPS than the G&G one. They also seemed to think it could probably take a M110 but not a M120 and default FPS out of the box is expected to be 320-330. But then mine was also expected 320-330 and I got 340.

Its all bad choices really. Glasses have gaps and hence you could loose an eye, googles fog and you need to do a lot to stop it being a problem none of which is cheap or that good and mesh is dark and lets fragments through to your eyes and you can have your eyesight damaged using them. Personally I am surprised anyone chooses glasses or mesh but they do. Personally I don't think that trade off makes any sense, I want maximum protection for my eyeballs, airsoft is a hobby and if I can't push up because of fog I'll just sit in cover and maybe get shot until it resolves. I don't care that much about winning. One of the reasons I have gone for the Bolle raiders is that they are smaller. They look like glasses but they are fully sealed. They go around the TMC lower mesh mask without impact so neither the mask nor the glasses are in the wrong place.

To get to the mall in time I would need to stay in a hotel the night before or the night after. The weekday events start to early to make so I would need to stay in a hotel the night before and the weekday events they run finish too late and I would need to stay in a hotel after the game. I have looked at all the timings and going all the way across London to Reading right at the start or end of the day isn't possible. I am more looking into the South and South east end of London. Billericay is a bit far, I would need a 09:30 start rather than the usual 08:30 to be able to make sites up there on time. So I am targeting more London end of Kent and South London within M25. How well a site is connected and how many changes I have really changes the timing a lot. I have found many of the Kent sites are no where near train stations making them very expensive (cabs) to get to and the train lines are obscure meaning many of them despite crow flies distance being fine are actually 3 or more hours away. Most of the sites down the train line I am on have closed. Gillingham for example used to have sites and there was Northfleet CQB. The three sites close to me were Bunker 51 and TWA urban and UCAP sandpit. Those 3 sites are all well within an hour, but with TWA urban closing down I have just the two. UCAP sandpit is no two tones (still got my CM16 transparent for at least 1.5 months due to Bunker 51 timing of games) so that is out of the question in the short term. I probably need to stick to half days for a while anyway as my fitness needs serious work! Hearing about heartattack hill in the sandpit does not sound like its the right site for me right now. TWA woodland is about 1 hour and 15 minutes but needs a cab to complete the journey and then the timings go up and up with further sites. Many just can't be reached for their start time. The placement of the nightclub looks like it would be just about close enough because of the train lines its on as well.

I am really missing that site now. I am intending to travel all the way out to Epsom this wednesday to get my hit but its going to take nearly 2 hours to make the journey out there and again coming back for a 3 hour game. Doubly worse is that there is literally one train at 23:19 that if I miss I am screwed. The close by hotel is completely full, and past that time I can't get all the way home without using cabs, and the whole journey I am told would be an eye watering £150. With Bunker 51 being shut for easter and a 4 week gap its really slim pickings for anything less than 2 hours away. I would do the Sandpit but no two tones allowed, so wont be doing that for a few months. The woodland site these guys do is pretty hard to get to unfortunately, so all in all I really hope the nightclub and TWA find some nice urban sites to use that aren't insane to get to.

I could be wrong I am new to this myself. What I know is I got a CM16 carbine and I was immediately concerned it was overpowered. I got mine chronographed locally and it came out at 335-340. I did a lot of looking online about what the components were by default and asked proairsoft and pretty much everything suggested it was an G&G M100 spring stock. The specs listed from G&G say its a 100 m/s (hence an M100 spring) so all in all the evidence all pointed to 100 m/s aka 328 fps. Now mine outperforms that a little bit, enough to be a problem for many sites near me so I had to downgrade. Initially I tried a G&G M80 spring to try and hit around 300 fps to be sure I was under, but the spring couldn't get the BBs past the hop up properly,they lost velocity dramatically and it didn't cycle well, got a lot of jams and generally it didn't work. I could have changed the bucking and nub for a softer one and that might of fixed it but I went with some advice from here that suggested I fit an M90 instead, and I chose an SHS M90 spring. That didn't have issues with the hop up and velocity came right in around 325 fps. I lost less FPS than I would have expected for the change, but then performance is now around 95 m/s, so its certainly within the realms of a m90 spring. So based on the fact I lost velocity dropping to an M90, and the speeds I am seeing I think this suggests the initial spring is an M100, and having them both here I can say the original spring is tougher to compress than the M90, and the M90 is much tougher than the M80. I think its more likely the M100 in it will be 330-340, the out of the box spec says 330 and that is more likely. But you need to get it chronographed to work out what it does before you get replacement springs, Just bare in mind range is mostly in the hop up unit not in the speed, so buy the gun and so long as your under site limits its all fine. You might want to up the fps a little but get a handle on the gun stock if you can, because I know from my own personal experience of getting into the gearbox and disassembly I would rather not have had to do work on it before I could use it. Too high = bad, too low isn't much of a problem.

Its a personal choice of the amount of risk taken, we are after all adults. But I think anyone that cares about keeping their sight should definitely go full coverage googles. Even mesh IMO is a bit of a risky proposition.

I could be wrong about this but I thought the G&G CM16 raider already comes with an M100 spring fitted as standard. Its specced to be a 330 fps gun so its literally a 100m/s and hence likely has a G&G M100 spring in it as standard. My CM16 Carbine came out of the box with 335 fps and a downgrade to an M90 was necessary to get it shooting below 328. You may find yours will shoot out of the box at 335-340, an upgrade to an M110 might be too much. When it comes to sights its really personal. I see a lot of people with T1 high scopes. Since your using a lower face mask you will probably want the scope to be raised off the gun a bit to make it easier to get on it as your cheek weld will be impacted, and the T1's are light and functional red dot scopes, all be it with a small aperture. You can get killflash's for them to defend against BB's so they can last a while. Since your playing outside at billericay I don't think the front grip matters much. I would say a flash light and a remote switch would be in order which often makes a CQB front sight a good idea but I doubt you'll be needing that much there so I don't think grip is very important. Just play some games and see what other people have and handle guns with different front grips to get a feel for what you want. You should do the same with the sights really as well, that way you can work out what it is you are likely to get on with.

Admittedly its a different world, but I used to play a lot of Arma 2 and Arma 3. A big part of making an effective fighting group is training and importantly ensuring a minimum level of training for everyone. Even in a computer game where everyone wants to be playing tactically and cooperatively, and with a tonne of online guides to do it, which they have all read, you find that getting emergent tactics even at a basic level is a real struggle. True coordination, like that necessary in MOUT and CQB, is something that has to be practised together as a team. Its only really when everyone is doing the exact same moves in the same way that you find it all starts to click and work, and it takes a lot of repeat practice even after the skills are learnt to keep it fresh. Its actually my number 1 concern with airsoft so far. Playing on my own I am not getting that tight tactical game, its mostly a lot of lone wolfs or very uncoordinated teams, they just haven't spent the last 4 years running platoons of guys in realistic computer games and they just don't do it the same way or know how to do it. I suspect there are sites where I could just slot into a team and it would really work well but its a real challenge with a bunch of random players and the teams that have this working already, they do not invite random nooby players to make their 4th man.

The CM16's can come in a bit hot for a lot of sites in the UK (>328) so its perfectly possible that the spring has been downgraded to meet the limits.

Heating the glass would absolutely work. Heating takes a lot of energy however, its no where near as cheap as running a fan. You only really need to equalise the glass to the temperature of the inside air however, which presumably is just a little over 40C. But then you reverse the problem, now on a cold winters day the condensation will appear on the outside. Its easier to clean off there but its also the dirtier side of the glass and hence a lot easier to form. I suspect the key challenge is power consumption, if there was one area it might get dragged down its 8+ hours of running heating wires.

Its a mix between 180 m/s STANAG 2920 ranging up to about 250 m/s STANAG 2920 and a few models that also do STANAG 4296. Having looked through the entire tactical range I think all of them are more than suitable for airsoft. However I would still prefer complete seal over glasses for the safety factor. They also do prescription carriers for a lot of their models as well so you can even get glasses fitted for them (which is why I initially bought them).

This is about the best guide I have seen to the various standards for eye wear: http://www.airsoftnews.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/EN-Safety-Standards-and-Protective-Eyewear.pdf As far as I know all of the Bolle tactical glasses are V50 STANAG 2920 around 180m/s. For airsoft purposes that is around 12 joules, but it has a 50% chance of penetration. As far as I know that is about as safe as you can get with googles/glasses. Bolle's googles do stop a much higher speed BB under the same standard but I don't think its right to say the tactical glasses aren't good enough for airsoft games, they definitely are and one of the gold standards.

The problem with fogging is the physics of the whole situation. You have a hot surface (your face) heating an area of air that is constrained due to the googles and moisture from your sweat producing a hot humid area separated by glass/plastic from a cooler less humid area. That will eventually produce condensation to appear no matter what you do. You can delay it with a spray/coating that dissuades the condensation from appearing, but that will only last so long before its overwhelmed. A variety of ways to do that including washing up liquid buffed into the lens or a variety of sold produces that basically all do the same thing. About the only way to stop it is to exchange that hot humid air with the cooler air from outside the googles. ESS have some with an active fan for example and that is meant to be very effective. The problem of course is then you have a battery pack powering a fan attached to your head band and the fan isn't exactly quiet so there wont be any sneaking up using it. The Bolle lopro regulators are googles which have a strip that can be pushed exposing a number of small holes well above the eye line that aren't big enough for a BB (although fragments are certainly going to fit through them) and that is meant to be relatively effective at cooling the internal area as well. The delta force guys still have this issue with their googles so there isn't a perfect solution yet. You have to trade some amount of safety to remove fogging in its entirety(or noise) and even then they still might fog. Mesh darkens the view and allows fragments through but it doesn't fog. Right now your only options are to pick which side of that safety/vision trade off you want.

My very first Airsoft game I was renting a full face mesh mask. At some point in the second game of the night a small broken particle of a BB got lodge right in front my one of my eyes. I noticed once I got back to the safe zone and what was concerning is that it was small enough to be pushed right through. I got lucky because it must have hit at an angle that stopped it heading towards my eye, but right there within 45 minutes of my first airsoft game I had seen all the evidence I needed that a mesh mask is a bit of a risky proposition. I combined that knowledge with an eye consultant telling me about exploding eyes from BB impacts and well I have since spent a small fortune on high quality googles. They are going to fog and that is a given problem, but not seeing temporarily in the middle of a game is better than never seeing again.

A set of genuine targets isn't very expensive, you get 50 of them for like £4. If you get a set with a pistol target on one side and the competition rifle on the other you can zero on the larger target and then fine tune on the smaller ones.

I am seeing the BFG and tornado's are around the same sort of cost. The blanks don't look all that cheap but then I don't imagine a grenade with propane/green gas and 200 BB's in it is particular cheap to fill either.

Rather than Pyro's I was considering getting either a propane and BB based grenade like the tornado or a blank firing grenade. Which would you say is the better option of the two or is there something else out there?

So long as the rounds never leave the premises legally you are fine. Its obviously a good idea to put a backstop behind what your shooting as the BBs will damage the walls and such. But other than that its exactly how I zeroed my sight. My neighbours so far haven't complained about that or the air gun.

With a transparent gun its also perfectly possible to buy replacement parts from the manufacturer, all be it at quite an expense usually. The ones with the front handguard and stock are a bit cheaper to fix as a RIF than ones with the receiver and stock for this as you probably want to replace the handguard with rails anyway at some point.