Future Paintball gun on TV

[logamus]

i have given thought to this idea on several occasions. to me, the biggest obsticles would be weight and in turn, recoil. if there is a way you can have the bolt "capture" the ball and then propel it to 300fps and then return that would be the best way. the recoil and cps would could be adjusted, but they would work in opposite of each other. raise the cps, you also increase the recoil. i would also think it would be hard to reduce the weight of the magnets needed to make this thing work. this is the kind of thing a bored paintballing electrical engineer needs to work on.

[vf-xx]

Actually there's a grad EE student here at Tech who's convinced they can make a coil gun for paintball. I have yet to get him to sit down and work with me on it tho..

[kscullin]

If you had the ball fall directly in front of the bolt, then a long breech for the bolt/ball to accelerate through, then the bolt stops at the barrel and is reset from there while the ball continues down the barrel, the ball should be cradled and accelerated smoothly enough to keep it from breaking.

With the proper setup, I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work. The length of the bolt is kinda immaterial (beyond a minimum required for acceleration), and you don't need a valve so all of that room could be filled with bolt/breech. It would put the feed neck close to the back of the marker (think RM) which could bring up balance problems, but so far those seem to have been relatively easy to solve. One potential problem is that, with the long breech and then the barrel, it may end up as long as a 98.

As far as the battery size/weight, the tank could be replaced with a rechargeable battery pack, which would solve the weight/placement/lack of a "stock" issues.