Help for a noob sniper

[halfsack2691]

Don't buy a ghillie suit.

 

I'm not intentionally slagging anyone off but I severly doubt that the majority of airsofters have the observation skills required to spot snipers anyway, unless you have a good pair of binoculars, about a week to sit in a hide waiting for the slightest movement from that dodgy looking bush and eyes like a s**t hawk, theres not a lot of point.

Good cover will provide you with all the concealment you need, or if your worried about being spotted use a bit of cam cream, the majority of people I have ever seen wearing ghillie suits get bored within five minutes of finding a position and start moving about, and even in this strange world we live in, a large moving bush moving toward your position creates alarm for most.

Airsoft just seems far too kinetic for the need of a ghillie suit even where snipers are concerned, I think the only time this really invalidates my opinion is for milsim, but even then, your just dragging around and big mess of plasticy leaves for a cosmetic look rather than tactical concealment.

[Ian_Gere]

^^You make some good points, Halfsack - unless people have the patience to sit still and wait for the perfect shot, there definitely is no point in wearing enhanced camouflage. That also includes movement after the shot.

 

My main objection to buying ghillie suits is that they are not that good. The trouble is that, although they do make an immediately identifiable human shape less so, the colour distribution of whatever they are made from is pretty homogeneous, so unless the colours miraculously perfectly match the terrain, they still form a shape which, at best, does not quite fit with the background. To take Halfsack's analogy, it's not the moving bush I'm on about, it's the bush of the wrong species, and you don't need binoculars to notice wrong colour. Having spotted the wrong colour, you then notice that the size of the anomaly is about right for what you'd expect to be able to see of a person, given the hard terrain.

 

They'd be much better if instead of the whole thing being an even distribution of whatever 4, perhaps 5, different fibres, the suit was randomly patchy - some small areas of all the fibres and big patches of the various combinations you could get from 2 or 3 of them. That still doesn't address the biggest issue however which is symmetry. If the suit is basically a woodland wookie suit, it is still a bipedal humanoid shape - but people don't like to wear stuff which wildly alters the symmetry of their shape: it doesn't look cool. The reason for this is that we are hardwired to find symmetry attractive and when we look at ourselves in the mirror, regardless of what me may be thinking about, subconsciously we want to appear attractive.

 

Rather than buy a ghillie suit then, if you want to be able to sit still and wait for "the shot", if you want your camouflage to work so that somebody 10m away can look right at you while actively looking for hidden opposition and not see you, you should make your own and make it heterogeneous and unsymmetrical.

 

The veil I have thrown over me in this pic has proved pretty successful:

...it is patchy.

[Bullet]

I would re iterate a previous post. Check out the airsoft sniper forum. It is truely incredible what people have come up with. As for price you may be told you have to spend a thousand pounds to be able to snipe, but from experience you 100% do not. There are many free mods you can do that will make you weapon more than useable!

 

However be prepared to read about your rifle and get used to tinkering with it. Again in my experience it is the most rewarding thing that you can do in airsoft.

 

On buying a rif, there are so many people who buy all the bits then dont like it that you can get some amazing "used once" deals. That is my only regret, i bought new!

 

If you nees anything else feel free to pm me!

 

Bullet