The History and Evolution of Ramping

I was hoping to get input on all the different ramping modes - what they started out as, how/when they changed throughout the years, and what were the reasons for the changes.

It would be great if this could be formatted by year, mode, and basic description of how it functions (e.g., first three pulls semi, ramps to x bps, as long as x bps pull rate is maintained, ramping restarts if within x second pause). You get the idea. Most of us have seen the descriptions in the marker manuals.

Hoping for NPPL, PSP, MIL, NXL, CFOA, and any others I don't know about. Please keep it to sanctioned league modes, no manufacturer or custom modes. Some may no longer exist, so if that could be mentioned for that year/mode, great.

Finally, I know there are various opinions on ramping, but I would appreciate if we avoid that discussion here. When tinkering with my markers recently, I noticed significant operational differences for the same modes. Therefore, I simply wish to compile facts of their operational changes over the years.

You might find something of interest from here

http://www.mcarterbrown.com/forums/d...y-ramping.html

To get the history, you need the none sanctioned modes. Ramping started with the original shocker. It was called turbo mode. The gun fired in normal semi until a factory determined amount of shots and then it fired at its maximum shots per second. In the original shocker, that was only 11 bps. The boards didn't have shot buffering so the shots were eratic until the shot counter reached its activation setting. You could hear the sound level out when it happened. It wasn't sanctioned, but it wasn't discouraged either.

I started reading that MCB thread, but it quickly turned into 9 pages of opinions and bantering/arguing.

So perhaps my assumption that modes have changed throughout the years is incorrect. It's starting to sound like activation/operation has remained fairly consistent, but the bps cap has changed over the years.

Probably the best way to figure this out is to find rule books for all the leagues for various years.

It started in 97 or so when the All Americans, SP's top factory team wanted to shoot faster so they developed the Turbo mode. You would have to pull the trigger for 4-5bps to start gaining the extra shots. It was hard to do(tried it on a Turbo shocker way back). Because there were no specific rules against the electronics adding in extra shots & that you had to reach a specific level, it still fell under the 1 pull, 1 shot rules.

By 1999/2000, most manufacturers had there own programs to mimic the turbo mode. This wasn't as much as a concern at this point, because the stigma of electro-pneumatic guns were on the outside looking in, just like when semis came into play at the pro levels against the established pumps. By 2002, most top teams were using Angels or the SP Impulse and the manual guns like the cocker were being phased out. With that, the rules started to catch up with the technology a bit.

I still use turbo on my Elcd frame and it works great. Like others have said, it's close to ramping but instead of just automatically shooting at 15 bps, I get an extra shot at a specified rate once I start shooting at 4-5 bps.

The Wicked Air Sports boards come to mind, since the marketing behind them with "shot buffering"/trigger debounce served the egos of the twibs with how they were out shooting the switch, and actually losing so many shots due to the electronic noise of the trigger switch that the board made up for it.

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Originally Posted by Nobody

It started in 97 or so when the All Americans, SP's top factory team wanted to shoot faster so they developed the Turbo mode. You would have to pull the trigger for 4-5bps to start gaining the extra shots. It was hard to do(tried it on a Turbo shocker way back). Because there were no specific rules against the electronics adding in extra shots & that you had to reach a specific level, it still fell under the 1 pull, 1 shot rules.

By 1999/2000, most manufacturers had there own programs to mimic the turbo mode. This wasn't as much as a concern at this point, because the stigma of electro-pneumatic guns were on the outside looking in, just like when semis came into play at the pro levels against the established pumps. By 2002, most top teams were using Angels or the SP Impulse and the manual guns like the cocker were being phased out. With that, the rules started to catch up with the technology a bit.

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the original argument that SP put forward for turbo mode being semi automatic was that there is switch bounce. the old rule was simply that it one shot, one pull. SP argued that switch bounce inherent is the design of most physical switches, which cause multiple triggering events, were actually trigger pulls. and every time you switch one of these switches, you get 3-5 trigger events, that normal boards filter out because they are non-sense. the turbo board simply stored them, and fired them after a predetermined amount of time. and SP argued that the switch picked them up, they were in fact, trigger pulls, and thus still one pull one shot.

warpig has a great article on the topic.

turbo mode i believe was banned shortly there after.

this whole line of using the extra trigger events inharent in switches to make guns fire faster is where we got WAS and others using an adjustable debounce setting. essentially you just keep turning down the debounce (which filtered out less and less trigger events) and your gun goes faster and faster.

this gave birth to trigger bounce and switch bounce. and the whole NPPL quest to ban it with the robot, refs taking guns and testing them etc.

eventually programmers got far more clever. the point being that when shooting as fast as possible, one cannot really tell how fast one is shooting the gun. so they invented true ramping. where the board adds shots at an increasing rate, the faster you pull the trigger. so you can run a real strict debounce, and at slow speeds where the refs can tell, your trigger is 1 pull 1 shot. but then as you pull faster it starts adding shots. so 2 pulls/sec youd get 2 bps, and at 5 pulls per second you get 5 bps, but if you get 8 pulls per second you get 9 or 10 bps, and at 10 pulls per second you get 12-14 bps ... and up and up.


this became so tough to enforce, that eventually it was legalized into what we call ramping today. which is probably more accurately called threshold ramping. this is where you hit a threshold of pulls per second, and the gun just shoots a higher speed. the threshold and the max bps has been regulated to different speeds depending on the league.