The Firestrike: How in the world is it so amazing?

So, the Firestrike. What makes it different from all the other blasters in the Elite lineup? It has the same firing section, and no barrel extension, yet it is still very accurate and powerful.

Theory 1: Compact size due to a direct-plunger system.
The direct plunger of the Firestrike is by far the largest of its kind in the Elite lineup. The firing cylinder is far larger than that of the Jolt or Triad. It makes a very good pistol for situations that do not require much stealth, and it is in fact unique among the Elite lineup in this way.

Theory 2: Accuracy... How does it do that? Perhaps it has something to do with the longer pin inside the dart. I have noticed that this device keeps the dart straighter prior to firing. A slightly curved dart actually makes a huge difference when you don't have an extended barrel. This actually makes a lot of sense, since the Jolt and Triad lack this feature. I have found in my experiments, however, that a simple 1/2 inch diameter barrel long enough to hold the entire dart without anything sticking out the front is much more efficient in accomplishing this task.

So, the Firestrike is actually pretty good. Plenty of power, and extra accuracy makes it many Nerfer's favorite blaster.

Since my goal is to outdo all the Nerf blasters on the market, I had to make some sort of a response to this. And I will say that this blaster one-up has been by far the most difficult. I started by taking out my most similar blaster to the Firestrike, and giving it the feature that it lacked before: extra ammo.

So now I present the latest edition of the Hunter pistol.

As I said, outdoing the Firestrike was not easy at all. But, it happens that I had done most of it already.

Still, the Firestrike is unbelievable in performance. Seriously, the engineers over at Nerf really tried hard on that one. I want to meet those guys some day. But for now, I'm stuck where I am, trying to do better than them with the tiniest budget ever. Wow, I feel small...

Last Post of the Summer

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile, I was putting some time into other hobbies and getting some hard work done finishing some projects. Here are the results of this past delay:

I did some work with 3D art, and this is how far I've gotten with this project.

This is the Pinpoint Mk II Blackjacket. It can be used as both a sniper rifle and a shotgun. It has a tactical rail on the top, and a new compact tailstock on the pump handle. It has a shorter firing section, but it is far lighter, and I was actually thinking of making it a pistol, but then I decided I had enough of those.

This is the near-finished Kabam. I basically took a Jolt and made it even smaller and even more powerful.

I did film some review videos, but I have had many troubles uploading them. I am open to suggestions:)

Lazer Tag in the Rockies

So, the reason I haven't made a post in the last week was because I was attending a family reunion in Colorado. However, I made sure I would have a nice, long article to write when I got back... so here it is!

I took along 4 Phoenix LTX's, two gold and two blue. They were a huge hit at the reunion. The playing fields went like this: Outside the two reunion cabins, inside a cabin, the dead forest (which is literally a bunch of white tree trunks that provide cover, but no shade) and the best one, outside the cabins... at night. I mean, have you seen the stars from the mountains? it is AMAZING.
So, the first thing I realized is how much more awesome laser tag is in the mountains of Colorado than the flatlands of Nebraska. I mean, rocks the size of minivans, and dirt that can maintain impossibly steep slopes. and that's just added on to all the regular features of Nebraska: trees, grass (well, in Colorado, it's all stiff shrubs) and paths. Now, on to the photos...

I-80 through Nebraska is so flat that you can always see at least one cell phone tower,  and at one point I counted 4 of them.

I did some mods and repairs while I was there, and I now have a newfound respect for what Mike Lovejoy does over at Tactical Tag. I have to ask him how he keeps all those hairsprings in line when he does his mods. The only mod I've ever done with one of these is adding a scope. The first try didn't turn out too good, that was about a year ago. But this time, I used an Orion UltraWide 15mm eyepiece, and this time it didn't look like looking through a cardboard tube, it used my entire field of view.

My cousin Ryan and second cousin Joey discuss team tactics in front of Centennial Reunion Cabin, while my cousin Mark runs off to find a hiding spot behind a small pine tree on top of the ridge behind the cabin. Such games simply don't happen in Nebraska.

My brother Dennis takes aim down a hallway during an indoor game. The LTX's could shoot al the way from one end of the cabin to the other, and my brother was taking advantage of that quite diligently.

Although we didn't play in this exact gorge, we played in similar landforms. Again, such landforms are seldom found in Nebraska.

Now this is never found in Nebraska.

One thing about mountain terrain is that everything is steep and big. For instance, the top of that mountain is half a mile away. Things are big in Nebraska too, but not in the same way as Colorado.

Enough with the pics, and on to the battle descriptions. The best tactic used, in my opinion, was in the night game. My teammate sniped from a second-story window, deliberately drawing attention to himself, while I used the gun with a scope and a sticky trigger, taking shots one at a time from behind a car. When my teammate left the window, I stayed behind the car and kept shooting, and I had hit:miss ratio of about 3:1. And all this time, I wasn't even noticed. I finally revealed myself when my teammate
did a dogfighting rampage from the porch of the cabin, and then retreated back to the window to conserve his health-- that's when I revealed myself. I held down the shield as I left my cover and retreated in order to conserve my health and get a better idea of my opponents' accuracy. After that, I did a long-range engagement, while drawing attention away from my opponent in the window. We won that round, despite the fact that one of our opponents was on 25 health and everyone else was on 10.

I learned this past week that LTX's have a mechanical design problem: the reload trigger sometimes fails to release the ammo core, thus making it much harder to dogfight. I fixed that problem with a small Swiss Army knife, which I am rather proud of.

Anyway, Tactical tag should definitely take a trip to Colorado. Snow Mountain Ranch / YMCA of the Rockies was where I stayed, but I'm sure there are better places to go for a game.

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.