The 'How Did Your Airsoft Day Go? Thread

[Impulse]

First normal game day back after surgery (I played AI500 last weekend, but this is my first regular skirmish day back) and... Mother Nature is having a laugh at my expense. Absolutely tipped it down in the morning during the brief and the initial getting stuff ready time, eased off a little for the gameplay, though it was still raining a decent amount, and then it absolutely tipped it down again after lunch. I'm not a cold and wet weather airsofter. I'll happily play when it's overly warm and 25 celcius or more, but when it gets cold I am no good, and when it gets wet it makes sniping a real pain with how wet scopes get and how hard it is to see through them. I brought the SRS and MTW with me today, with the hi-capa and mk23 as pistols, and decided to go with the SRS + hi-capa combo. I also made the decision last night to not pack my usual sniping ghillie setup with the cape and boonie and opted instead to bring my cobra hood so that I could wear it over my gore-tex CCE waterproof jacket and that was a fantastic decision as I remained largely dry all day!

 

Anyway the first game was a king of the hill game at a base that is... not the best for sniping. My friend decided to head more towards the objective, so I held the flank instead and marveled as my cobra hood did its job rather well. A sneaky yellow-team player managed to get all the way around and started shooting people in the back. Took a bit of time for me to make sure he was actually a yellow player and not just a trigger happy blue as his armband was on his opposite arm so I couldn't see it, but I did eventually manage to see his armband and took him out with the hi-capa. He walked right past me and didn't see where I was! I managed to take a few players out who decided to try the flank but my efforts swiftly dissuaded the yellow team from pushing along there and it got quiet, though I did manage to take out an enemy sniper about 10m in front of me as I saw the foliage moving unnaturally and just waited for him to move into a spot where I could get him with the hi-capa; I could hear his rifle shots and he did take out quite a few blues from his spot, but eventually he moved and I took him out! However this showed me reasons #1 and #2 as to why I'm not a huge fan of this SRS. Reason #1 is the bolt pull; it is horrendous and I had to be really careful about when I pulled the bolt back as the movement would definitely get me spotted unlike my gas m700s where I can pull the bolt back very slowly and deliberately to where people won't see me doing so even if looking directly at me. I would not get away with that with the SRS! And reason #2 was that rain got into the hop rubber. This is an issue on my gas m700s as well to be fair, but the SRS is even worse with how exposed the hop rubber is to the elements. It just stopped hopping well at all and I had to crank the hop up to lift .45s. Lost a bit of consistency as well, with the occasional shot flying wide. Regardless, blue team won that because we had a bunch of people sprint for the objective at the start and then locked it down before the yellow team could get there, so we held it the entire game. I'll never be one of the initial sprinters, but having those players on a team is such an advantage against us walkers. Hey, I have a bolt action and a ghillie, I have an excuse to move slowly! 😂

 

Second game was a multi-objective game and I really enjoyed it. Managed to get into a very forward position, but with how blurry my scope was, how dark the woodland was, and how rubbish my now-wet hop rubber was being, I couldn't get many shots from that spot. However, I got a couple trying to use the ridge line on our right as a staging point, but eventually one spotted me and while I took him out with the hi-capa, he very much knew where I was so I knew it was time to move. I managed to sneak my way out of my spot and headed back to re-organise my magazines. I also realised reason #3 as to why I'm not a huge fan of this SRS; two of my magazines aren't feeding properly. Fortunately I'm used to having low round count so I could make do with the 3x SRS mags that worked. Anyway, I repositioned to a spot I had scoped out last month when I was still on blood thinners and using the lunch times to look for spots, so it was my first time using this spot and it worked an absolute charm. I could easily pick people out of a bunker about 50m to my front, cover the path to the left of them, and also I was concealed enough that the few who pushed to the ridge line and tried to use that just... didn't spot me. One player came up on our flank there and absolutely wrecked about 5 or 6 blue players with his pump shotty, but he didn't spot me lying about 10m in front of him, so I remained completely still until he looked away, at which point I picked up the hi-capa and took him out. He had a giggle about it as I wasn't even behind anything, just lying completely still and not silhouetting as there was a pile of logs to my other side. By this point, however, I realised that my hi-capa wasn't hopping now either as I'm sure some rainwater had now got to that hop rubber as well. I burned through most of my ammo from this spot, picking people off with my SRS through my rather blurry scope and remained there until the game was over.

 

During lunch I put the SRS and hi-capa away and swapped over to the MTW and mk23, however after I made sure it was chrono'd fine (it's still 1.1J because I have a Halloween night game next weekend that I want to use it for) and shooting well on the range, I was about to head back out... and then that's when the heavens opened up again. At that point I was like "you know what... I'm not going out in that" and hung around the safe zone chatting to people under some cover. My friend came back after about 30 mins, absolutely soaked, and we decided to pack our stuff away as the rain abated for a little. It picked back up, so it was the right thing to do, but not as heavy as it was when I was about to head out!

 

Anyway, I'm really happy to be back playing airsoft, but this SRS isn't it. My MTW is probably going to be my go-to for the winter and I'll put it back up to 1.88J after the night game next weekend, but I'm also going to revisit a spring VSR build and give that a spruce up as there are a lot nicer upgrades available now since I originally did my spring VSR build in about 2019. I think that'll be a lot less vulnerable to getting water inside the hop rubber due to the fact that it's not poking out and mega exposed like the SRS one.