For your normal AEG I'm still putting r-hop down as snake oil along with the fallacy that a longer tighter bore barrel is 'more accurate'. I've shot a huge array of guns and I've never had one shoot reliably further than 60 yards (that's a measured 60 yards on a range, not an airsofter's "my gun shoots coke cans at 60 yards") effective range. R-hop, j-hop, q-hop bla bla bla... none of them shooting 350fps or less have gone really any further reliably than that distance.
There's plenty of evidence on how R-hop is effective. AirsoftMechanics is the home where all of this 'snake oil' stuff generally comes from. Ask any reputable tech on there on how Rhop is effective,some practical evidence and theoretical evidence on how it is superior to traditional hop up.
A longer tighter barrel has been shown,quite a few years ago to offer no real gains unless you have your gun matches to it. There's a thing called matching the volume of your cylinder to the barrel length,roughly,so the BB will always have air pressure pushing down on it. The thing is unless you have constant pressure behind the BB and instead have decreasing pressure It can reduce backspin and overall effectiveness. It's more widely accepted at ASM that the BB rides the top of the barrel from experiments with translucent acrylic barrels and simply looking at wear marks. Right now it seems that barrel bores at around 6.05 and a length of 400-430mm has been the 'sweet spot' for some guns but again,there are lots of variables such as air seal quality and consistency and volume matching.
That and sorbo pads, radiused gearboxes... really now? I know I roll this out pretty regularly but my old Marui M4 had been chugging away reliably for MORE THAN A DECADE with zero maintenance before I sold it, that includes a couple of years sat in a box under a bed with all the seals 'drying out' (clearly they didn't) and it shot just as well on the day I chrono'd it for sale as it did the day I bought it back in 2001. This is the same brand that uses 'crappy plastic bushings' and pot metal gears along with a terribly low tech non-radiused gearbox shell and not a bearing in sight! Yes, there are performance gains to be had on this design, but even so they're marginal... bearing spring guides etc yeah, they might extend the life of the gun by another decade?
Sorbo pads reduce shock to the gearbox shell,so there is less stress on the metal. Shock absorbing is very much real and far from snake oil. Run a gun with no sorbopads on a 150 and one with sorbopads and see the difference. Radiusing gearboxes is no where near as effective as sorbo padding but does help marginally. A right angled cylinder window is more likely to crack than a radius ed one. If you can just imagine how the stress goes about on that point it will be clearer. I'm still rather novice at this AEG tech stuff,so I'm not too good at explaining.
The thing with old TM reliability- They are not built to be upgraded,taken apart or to have different parts jammed in. All of their stuff is made in house to match each part well,tolerances are tight. The whole gearbox is under very low stress. The spring is soft, so there is no massive load to compress and no massive stress on the gearbox. The gears are under low stress so the bushings can be plastic. The piston is weak to stop you from jamming in a massive spring and going over the 1J legal limit.
Seals generally don't dry out,silicone grease is fairly resilient stuff and I've never had any of my seals drying out. It's idiots who coat their shit in petroleum based slicone sprays who complain of seals going out or hop rubbers drying.
Any gun can last a decade if it's matched well to the parts and tuned. That's TMs trait,it's ready to go with all the stuff in there. The chinese have their stuff OEM by different factories so tolerances are off. They produce things in massive quantities so everything is rushed and quickly assembled. Instead of designing and engineering everything with tight tolerances they just make it out of a tougher material. If you yourself decide to do what the factory should be doing in the first place,like not sneezing on it to lubricate it and not having a blind 4 year old assemble it,and putting in a weaker spring to reduce stress then they can chug along for decades of abuse due to even stronger parts than a TM. Not everyone has the skill or will to do all the little tuning so they guns often fail due to being over stressed or due to poor QC.
The fixation with upgrades is what's really driving airsoft tech- we have things like CNC machined Chromoly steel gears which can take literally any spring reliably,neodymium motors with massive amounts of torque leading to more efficiency,dual sector gears for 50+ RPS and of course mods like G hop and R hop to get as much range and accuracy as possible. Airsoft tech has evolved massively. Compare the internals and performance of a Marui m4 from the early 2000s to something proper high tier like a Lonex M4 and there is a noticeable difference in material use and parts quality.
