Are GBB guns expensive to run?
They are a little bit more expensive than AEGs because the cost of gassing up a lot of mags, which typically only hold thirty-odd rounds each (for an assault weapon that is), when compared to the cost of a charging your AEG's battery, which might enable you to cheerfully fire off high cap mags all day long, is not equal. Then of course there is certainly a little more time to be spent lubricating and cleaning the working parts of a GBB if one hopes to keep it working smoothly, as opposed to an AEG, which could literally go for weeks without so much as a wipe with a damp cloth. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, or even a chore, if you happen to like guns and looking after them as much as you like using them.
The main cost is probably acquiring a GBB, and sufficient magazines for it. The magazines for a GBB are typically 25-50 quid each, and you need five or six of them to emulate a typical soldier's patrol loadout, so for a typical assault rifle, you might be spending another 200-300 quid just for magazines if it is a GBB. Conversely, AEG mags are more typically about 10 quid and you can get away with just one high cap one actually, and as you know, most AEGs come with one of those anyway. Even if you go with carrying six low cap AEG mags for a bit more reloading realism, you can invariably find boxes of five or six AEG mags can be had for about thirty quid or so.
Offsetting all of that additional GBB cost is the enhanced realism of a GBB of course. Unlike with an AEG, the firepower of a GBB is held in the magazines, as it is in a real firearm, so changing mags is a more realistic experience; the weapon is inert without a mag, unlike an AEG, so the emulation of a real firearm is vastly closer when using a GBB, even to the extent of field stripping the bolt and gas return mechanisms, which are often an almost identical procedure to the real weapon when field stripping a GBB version of it. The clatter of the action is more visceral than the whirring of an AEG and more akin to the sound you hear when firing the real weapon, the gas tends to give off a bit of visible vapour too, which looks more like a real firearm as well. Given that all these things add to the experience we are trying to emulate with airsoft, both when using and maintaining the weapon, you could argue that all of that offsets the additional cost, by adding to the value of the experience of owning and using a GBB.
Trouble is of course, that they are notoriously crappy in these present low ambient temperatures lol. But come summer, they are certainly the thing to have if you want something which will add to the fun of things, and i would say that their ability to add fun to the proceedings makes the cost worth the price of entry. Thus at the moment, my GBBs - MP5K, AKS74U, Colt 1911, Walther PPK - are all hibernating, but come summer, they'll certainly be getting an outing, and I'll be too busy having fun with them to worry about each shot maybe costing one pence more.
lol
