Sniper automatic blaster? and some other ideas...

So, I had an idea for a blaster that takes after real machine guns, and since I've made a Nerf sniper rifle before, i was just thinking, what if I made several high-power firing sections out of, say, PVC pipe and had a tank with dry ice or liquid nitrogen as the power source? It would probably end up being a chain gun of sorts, with several firing sections for links and then a single stabilizing barrel out the front, looking somewhat like an Elite Spectre with a chain and a tank in the back.

Also, I would like to note that blasters are much cheaper when made from scratch. Just buy some 1/2 inch PVC pipe, look at the price, and think of just how cheap you could make barrels for. Also, 1 inch pipe will work with Mega darts. The rest is just a compressed air source, and a valve, and presto! You have a high-power homemade dart blaster, and you got 20 times the performance for your money than if you bought a blaster at a store.

Another idea is carrying a dart in a ball of moving air instead of leaving it on its own. It would work like blowing smoke rings, except they would be invisible, and they would carry a dart with them. The firing section would be much smaller, and then a tin can with a 3/4 inch hole in both ends would come right after the firing section, and it would be what generates the moving bubble of air. However, the setback to this is that the dart will fall out of the bubble after about half a second, and reloading might be quite a pain. Even so, the result of such an equipped blaster would be able to shoot about 50 feet and aim like a laser tag gun, and the dart would take only half a second in transit, being nearly impossible to dodge.

But anyway, I only have the budget for the second idea, and that'll be my next project. I'm just putting these ideas out there for other Nerfers to try, since my budget, honestly, is almost nothing. Just a word of advice, though... this type of blaster can sometimes hurt on impact, so don't paint the muzzle orange, cuz that would be borderlining illegal.

The Modifly: The One Blaster.

"One Blaster to rule them all, One Blaster to find them, One Blaster to bring them all and in the darkness snipe them."

Basically a summary of the Modifly. The last line sounded especially nice, since it has a red dot sight on the front and I made it mostly black, and almost all black on the front for night stealth operations. It has some unique features, including my most advanced type of dart, an open back, and a handy little niche for stowing that one extra dart that you need in a pinch. (#mylastdart)

It has an interesting set of darts in its 8 barrels:
1. filled-head fletched-tail Elite dart: 113 ft max, accuracy= 1" @ 40 ft
2. filled-head Elite dart: 111 ft max, accuracy= 3' @ 40 ft
3. same as 2
4. BuzzBee Toys Suction Dart: 40 ft max, accuracy= 3" @ 15-20 ft
5. same as 4
6. same as 2
7. same as 2
8. filled-head twisted Elite Firefly dart: 95 ft max, accuracy= 7" @ 35-40 ft

The Modifly was the first mod I ever did, and it started with an all-out efficiency upgrade (referring to the efficiency of the energy transfer from the firing spring to the dart). I removed the pins and springs from inside the barrels, and that actually increased the performance by a bit. The blaster is in fact not even that powerful, but it has the highest firing efficiency I have ever seen on a blaster (not counting flywheel-powered blasters), with the Pinpoint following close behind. 

It has  a forward-mounted handle, and everything else is all a stock. It has an open back that allows you to look inside to diagnose mechanical problems and check to see whether or not the spring is cocked back and ready to fire. 

This blaster is a nocturnal stealth multipurpose blaster. It works rather quietly, since little of the firing energy is converted to sound and wasted (except when it fires a blank, then it's quite loud). Also, I replaced the metal hairsprings with rubber bands, since they have less of a tendency to resonate. I deliberately left some orange on the front, because that's what tells other people that it's not a real gun. (Just a word of advice to repainters, if it can't injure somebody, paint the muzzle orange... it's for your own safety.)

As a closing statement, if N-Strike Elite is the final word in today's blaster technology, the Modifly is tomorrow's blaster technology. This is my official statement that I am better than Hasbro.

New Dart Technologies

Distance
Many of my mods have a key element to their performance increase: filled head darts. These are simply darts that have had the heads opened up, filled with melted polymer, and closed back up again. This simple modification busts through the speed and distance limitations of normal darts. However, they only really benefit from modified blasters. Their added weight simply makes them more demanding when it comes to acceleration power and transferred kinetic energy.

A filled head dart. It looks like a stock dart, but it has a characteristic spooky stability when supported near the head.

Some talk about kinetic energy...
Kinetic energy is a topic with little application to stock darts, but once they get heavier, it becomes very important- and with modified blasters, it skyrockets. For example, my Pinpoint sniper rifle, a blaster I made from scratch, puts 40 foot-pounds of kinetic energy into the dart, and that borderlines on ripping a gash in the dart's side. Darts actually only last around 5 shots before they're only useful in flywheel blasters. Also, even a filled-head dart loses 75% of its kinetic energy before hitting its target when being shot out of the Pinpoint.

the Pinpoint sniper rifle

Tail fletches
Tail fletches on darts perform two purposes: (1.) they direct air more smoothly around the rear of the dart, and also slightly to one side, which (2.) puts a stabilizing radial spin on the dart. This is what gave th. Hunter pistol its half-inch accuracy. Also, I made it a recent addition to the Modifly, tripling its accuracy down to 1 inch. Tail fletches look like inside-out arrow fletches, and they serve basically the same purpose.

Tail fletches on  the Hunter pistol's one and only dart

N-Sports FireVision Flyer Disc Review

So I finally got my hands on the only kid of flying disc that Nerf currently sells, and when I tested it, I realized just how much I was paying to have the Nerf logo on it. It cost $14.99 at Target, and it just barely is good enough for my purposes.

Flight characteristics

It doesn't even fly straight. It leans toward the outside and falls to the ground about 75 feet away usually, and then it rolls an additional 50 feet or so. However, used as a tactic in a Nerf competition, throwing it at your target when they're more than 15 feet away is just a dumb idea.

However, the leaning can be fixed by warping the inner rim downward about an inch, but the hard part is getting it to stay there. You would need to heat it up to just below its melting temperature in order for it to maintain its modified shape.

"Microprism Technology"

In short, this technology is over 25 years old, and Nerf decided to use the cheapest stuff they could find. A microphotograph of the edge of one of the outer reflective areas reveals that it is indeed a prism-based system, but it happens that the prisms are made of just clear plastic. There is a lot of chromatic aberration in the retroreflection, causing rainbow-ish things to form all over the place when you shine a white light at it. 

Microphoto of microprism material

Me with the disc

 In short, I got what I wanted for about 10 times what it was worth.

Now, on to where i got the idea from...

This video basically summarizes the TV show Tron: Uprising. Its literally amazing. And, as a bonus, nerf-ifying ideas from this... could create a whole nw kind of Nerf war. Fighting with discs, poles, and all that... its just way better and than blasters and so deliciously complicated. Discs will take a while to explore, but adding poles, lightbikes, and all the other aspects of Tron... there is much to be explored.

The good old days of regular dart blasters: a blast from the past

I have one modified blaster that fires one modified dart... the Hunter pistol. I decided the GPS and stuff were too expensive for a Nerf blaster, but the blaster still performs amazingly well. The thing is, the dart it uses is about 10 years old. I barely even remember it from back then.

The dart has grooves cut in the back of it that serve as fletching, but stay within the tube that it's fired from. The purple on the back is a foam pad htat sits on the cheekbone and absorbs the kick- which this blaster has a surprising amount of.

This is probably my oldest mod- my brother started it over a year ago.

Anyway, I now have a blster rack in my closet with unique hooks fopr each individual blaster... and a hanging clip for my experimental body armor. I only have 6 blasters up there, and one leaning in a corner waiting for me to make more ammo for it... it needs special darts that have metal nuts inside the heads.

The hunter pistol is accurate to half an inch radius of your target because of the grooves in the dart, so if you ever miss, it's all your fault. So sucks for you... but not the blaster :)

So, as a final word, I'm not leting go of darts. They still have some very practical uses. I'm just trying some non-dart ideas.

Defecting away from darts

Recently, I have been trying to find a replacement for dart blasters, and I have come up with two promising ideas. The first idea is a crossbow. Crossbows have been around for over a millennium, and dart blasters have been around for what, less than 40 years? So, crossbow technology will probably perform far better than any dart blaster ever could. Even with disc blasters coming out, those don't seem too promising, either. Ring blasters may outdo crossbows in range, but high-performance flying rings have to be tuned perfectly, and retuned often. Crossbows have to be tuned once, and only once, and each shot is extremely reliable.

My idea for a Nerf crossbow came from a Nerf-ified youth bow i saw at my brother's Nerf LARP party he had about a year ago. It could scarcely fire over 35 feet, but it was still a very weak bow. The crossbow and head I'm looking at should prove far more practical. The crossbow puts 80 foot-pounds of kinetic energy into the bolt, which is only twice that of my current Nerf sniper rifle, the Pinpoint. however, the Pinpoint shot darts, which lost over 75% of their kinetic energy from various forms of aerodynamic drag, even autorotation. Over the millennium that crossbows have existed, that has nearly been eliminated.

Crossbows, unlike darts, are quiet, sleek, and accurate to less than an inch. 

Problem is, they're a bit pricey, but that's the only problem I can think of.

Anyway, here are the crossbow and heads I'm eyeing for this project:

 

On to the next idea, which is a flying ring. Nerf already has one, but the modification is in how it's used. I took inspiration for Tron, which, by the way, is pretty awesome.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, 2000 more words should explain the idea enough.

 

It does miss out on the melee part of the the idea, which is simpler: Throwing a disc at your opponent is not as reliable as hitting them with it.

In conclusion, I will say that I am open to questions and comments, and also ides for what mods I could do for money.