K.I.S.S.

In lieu of Tactical Tag's threefold article, "the edge of innovation," I have created a response, and I stumbled upon another idea .

These recent weeks in the NIC have had an air of "let's find new technology." So Tactical Tag created a whole new blaster concept that was the culmination of all the NIC-created blaster technology. It seems to perform like an overpowered Rapidstrike. It just so happens that last weekend I finally did the lithium upgrade on my Rapidstrike that has been waiting for a long time- it boasts 60-70 fps and about 6 shots per second. 

Okay, it's been several days since I wrote on this article. Back to it. About the title, KISS stands for keep it simple, shithead. (Pardon my French.) This was my response to the blaster concept that was recently introduced. I'll just list some pros and cons: 

Pros:

Powerful

Fast release by the butterfly valve

Repeating/ internal power source

Compact

Cons:

Noisy compressor

Heavy all over

Distance between the breech and pump handle

Slow reload

Clunky systems

Now on to the new tech presented here- let's just take a look.

Brass breech

Butterfly valve

Compressor? Not too practical...

I just wanted to say that yes, we can innovate, but innovation is not at all an easy thing to accomplish. It takes a lot of time and money, and hasbro isn't going to spare that.

One-Handers and Behemoths

So recently I've taken the liberty of going big. It certainly makes blasters look more menacing, and with my Rapidstrike, the flywheels make an intimidating sound anyway.

Pinpoint
I have been working on the Pinpoint for over two years now, and recently it has gone through several makeovers. I extended the barrel, added a piece of a Recon to act as a small fragment of a shell, and added a sorely needed bipod. There have been many projects called "nerf sniper" or something of the sort, but they mainly focus on outward appearance. The Pinpoint is engineered almost entirely for performance. It can reach muzzle velocities of over 130 feet per second, and it has unmatched accuracy and stability.

Rapidstrike (Cobra Mk III)
Yes, I did have to try 3 times to make a one-hand automatic blaster that worked properly. It really didn't go well the first two times, with darts melting and motors shaking themselves to death and many other dramatic failures. But now it works, it is remarkably comfortable, it only uses one hand, and it's HUGE.

This blaster and the pinpoint both adapt a lot of technology from archery. The arm cuff on the Cobra III is similar to arm guards used in archery to protect the forearm from the bowstring. This blaster is actually quite heavy, but I can still support its weight with my arm fully extended.

Kingfisher
The Kingfisher, my Retaliator mod, is now a one-hander. It reloads by means of a neck strap/cord, attached to the sliding primer on the top. I also added a string reaching from the end of the handle to the end of the stock (because it looks nice and makes it look a lot bigger). Je vous presentez le Kingfisher.

About what I said earlier in the way of hugeness...

As you can see, my Rapidstrike is big, heavy, and intimidating. It's even more intimidating with a 6-dart clip in it. It has some nice performance, just an accuracy upgrade from stock form, but not much.

The Big Picture of Development

The development of dart blasters can be compared to the development of firearms. And that's exactly what I'm doing in this article.

The earliest known weapons mankind used were rocks thrown at targets. The Nerf counterpart would be the original Nerf ball, made from the invention that started it all - Non-Expanding Recreational Foam.

Then it goes to Chinese hand cannons, and Nerf making a "gun" to shoot the harmless foam balls.

Chinese hand cannon (Wikipedia)

In Europe, firearms developed into the first smooth-bore personal firearm, and then muskets, which lines up with the invention of darts.

Then we reach the point of flintlock rifles, and here Nerf makes a jump and skips a step.

Europe then develops breech-loading technology, and Nerf comes out with the Sawtooth, a 5-shot clip-fed blaster.

Sawtooth (Nerf Wiki, AFoN)

This also covers the invention of repeating firearms, starting with revolver pistols (comparable to the Maverick REV-6).

Then, finally, we get to the age of automatic firearms. The first automatic blaster was the Stampede, not  breech-loading, similar to early gatling guns. Then with the invention of breech-loading automatics, we have the Maxim gun, firing 600 rounds per minute, but requiring a team of 10 to operate. For blasters,

we come to the well-known Vulcan, which only requires 1 person, but it would be nice to have two.

Overall, the largest difference between these two developmental timelines is the scale of them. Nerf products first came out in 1970 with the Nerf ball. Humans started throwing rocks before they became sentient. Then we get to the first Nerf blasters, debuting 18 years later, and that compares to the gap from pre-sentience to the Yuan dynasty, say, 18 million years or so. At every step of the way, Nerf moves far faster. Currently, Nerf hasn't yet developed an automatic breech-loading rifle. 15 years from the first nerf blaster, we have advanced as far as firearms did over a span of about 1500 years. 

This summer, I plan to get my hands on a newer Vulcan and modify it into an automatic sniper. But that means another article entirely.

Happy New Year to the NIC

Happy New Year, everyone! In this giant article I'll be doing my best to catch up on all the stuff I missed during my long period of "blog silence," for lack of a better term. I set up a sort of "display" of all the topics in this article:

First, I will debut 3 new mods: The Kingfisher, a BuzzBee Range Master Extreme, and a HammerHead.

The Kingfisher is mostly a Retaliator with a bigger spring. It has a different barrel, a carbon fiber reinforced old Recon stock, and my handy virtual-image sight. It is a quiet, accurate blaster for shorter-range shots.

The HammerHead mods I did are rather simple. First, I replaced the recoil spring with a rubber band. I often do this to make blasters quieter. With TR blasters, however, quietness will never be their strong suit. The more important mod is that I lubricated the mechanisms with my own LubriKing concoction, a water-based light lubricant made for plastic parts that would normally rub and cause friction.

The LubriKing formula is simple: 2:1 of water and soap, and then add chalk dust. This forms soap micelles around the particles of chalk, making microscopic rollers that stay between parts and reduce friction. The result is a much faster TR blaster. however, the clip should never be lubricated, since the forward ring hook has to return to its original position before the ring falls into place, otherwise the blaster misfires and/or jams.

My brother bought me a Range Master Extreme for Christmas. It has a pneumatic reservoir and a pump, as opposed to the usual plunger piston. It works as a bolt-action rifle, with the bolt attached to the assembly of the entire firing mechanism. In this setup, the piston stays fixed while the cylinder, reservoir, valve and breech slide with the bolt handle.
I found it impossible to remove the AR from the breech. The AR in this blaster actually helps accelerate the dart in the little space that it has.

The power mod was simple enough: cover the limiter valve hole with a piece of tape. This allows the blaster to charge up 7 pumps, as opposed to the previous 4-5 pumps.

I also added a functioning optical scope to replace the plastic dummy sight that it came with.

In normal conditions, the blaster ranks in my high-power class with a muzzle velocity of about 85 ft/second. At 0°F, however, muzzle velocities were around 55 ft/second.

This leads right into the topic of the Earthglider, which I have mentioned before. It is basically a remote-controlled car with a shortened Nerf sword on the front. It has the capability to outrun a person in many situations, but I made it specially for winter. It will not run on snow that is too powdery, since it digs itself in and then must be retrieved.  Its soft tires spread its weight out more than a person in boots, so in most situations, it has the key advantage of being able to traverse on the snow, not through the snow.

I also pulled out my two other snipe blasters to compare to my new Extreme blaster.
As for speed, the new sniper falls short of the Pinpoint and the Blowsword, a mere 85 fps against 105 and 115. Its accuracy, however, is paramount. The Extreme darts are made with harder foam and much higher consistency. 

Have a happy 2014! :)

The Earthglider

I have had an idea for a unique strategy for a Nerf war for quite some time, and that idea is a remote-controlled car. I just did a unit conversion of its top speed, and it can reach up to 35 ft/second. That's as fast as the entire Elite lineup shoots darts. The Earthglider is also more agile than a person, which is insanely good. It simply is a remote control car with a shortened nerf sword on the front.

An overview of the Earthglider, showing its overall shape.

The Earthglider's ribbed front tires are critical to its agility.

 This is a 1/10th scale remote-controlled car that is stronger than both of my arms put together. It is entirely electric-powered, but I don't have a battery for it at the moment. It has a 50-gram steering servo, which gives it most of its agility. The car doesn't even have brakes, but it has about 10 square inches of tire in contact with the ground, giving it a huge amount of rolling friction. From top speed, it still stops in about 50 feet on a smooth surface. I am looking forward to next spring, when I can actually start using this. :)

It's hard to see, but if you look closely, you can see the steering system inside that little cove in the front.

The Earthglider actually is as fast as a dart fired from a stock blaster. I was actually quite surprised when I discovered this. On my front lawn, it rides the bumps like a speedboat, since it just rides on the top of each bump and then hops over to the next one. Its suspension is actually extremely well-tuned, allowing it to chase down a person on most types of ground.

This picture shows the Earthglder's motor and knobbed rear tread.

Questions and comments will be warmly welcomed! :)

~N-Strike Epic

Rapidstrike Review!

This is going to be an official review of the Rapidstrike. I will be including a general review, some reverse engineering, tactical advice and modding advice.



General Review

The Rapidstrike is an automatic flywheel-type blaster. The flywheels have ben optimized for maximum performance and minimum damage to the darts, making power mods pointless. It is already rather powerful, anyway. It has an accuracy of about a 6 foot radius at 30 feet in stock form, giving it a substantial, but not very useful, range. At 15 feet it gets about a 2 foot radius.
Unmodified, this blaster is most useful as a dogfight/swarm blaster, but its weight and bulkiness make the Rampage significantly better for this task. Even for $40 at Target, this blaster is not quite worth the money.

The best advice I can give is that it's best if you use the jam door to stop the flywheels instead of letting them just coast. Holding down the acceleration trigger with the jam door open will create a closed circuit between the motor terminals, which quickly and forcefully stops the flywheels.



Reverse Engineering

This is a photo of the internals of the Rapidstrike from Coop772:

Safety Switches and Lockouts:

1. Forward Clip Sensor: No power flows when this is released.

2. Rear Clip Sensor: This is a mechanical lockout that keeps the launch trigger from being pulled.

3. Jam Door Switch: This switch is depressed when the jam door is open or partially open. It cuts off power to the flywheels, and also stops them when the door is opened.

4: Trigger-to-Trigger lockout: This is a mechanical lockout that keeps the launch trigger from being pulled when the acceleration trigger is not pressed.

Triggers:

1. Acceleration trigger: This cuts off all electrical connection from the flywheels when it is not pressed.

2. Launch trigger: Gives the dart advance system the command to cycle continuously. 

More on the dart advance system:

The dart advance system is comprised of a motor, a gearbox, a crank, a shaft, and a switch. The switch is depressed once each cycle when the shaft is fully retracted, cutting power to the motor. The switch is wired in parallel with the launch trigger, so when the launch trigger is pulled, the recetion switch does not stop the cycle of the shaft. If the clip is removed mid-cycle, the forward clip sensor cuts all power and the cycle remains uncompleted until the forward clip sensor is depressed.

Modding Advice

The rapidstrike uses C-type batteries for a reason. It has the rating stated on the side of the blaster as 6V DC, 30W. The C batteries have lower internal resistance, and can uphold the high current demand of the blaster without too much voltage sag. I used a 9V rectangular battery for a while, but it made the blaster significantly less powerful. The only significant battery upgrade would be to install a large 2-cell lithium polymer battery (7.4V) with equivalent capacity, but this would be expensive and would only make the blaster lighter.

As I said earlier, the Rapidstrike does not get any benefit from power upgrades. This is because it has already been optimized in the tradeoff between lack of power and dart damage.

So, the only mod I did was an accuracy upgrade, which involved moving the rifled barrel section forward so it could do its job. The rifling actually does work, but only when the dart comes in contact with the side of the barrel. I moved the barrel forward, leaving an open space for the dart to traverse unsupported. The darts would occasionally prematurely veer off-course, resulting in a massive pileup where the barrel used to be. To remedy this, I added about 3 inches of barrel tubing from my old Recon, and that solved the problem. Since the barrel is now farther forward, the darts come in contact with its inside surface, doubling the blaster's accuracy.

Also, I have a personal preference to have an open area of casing instead of a closable jam door, so I removed the jam door.

I added the handle from my Retaliator to the lower rail to help support the hulking mass of plastic and metal that the Rapidstrike is, and I also added my 9-LED floodlight on the left side rail. It seems to be quite effective in blinding an opponent in low-light conditions.

I plan to make a custom high-capacity clip for the Rapidstrike, since it empties its current one so quickly. I have encountered some problems, but I hope I can solve them.

Feel free to comment any questions you may have, and I will reply as soon as I can.

Thank you! ~N-Strike Epic

Epic New Blasters and Breaking the Flywheel Barrier

So, all along, my mission has ben to make blasters that outperform all current stock Nerf blasters. I have succeeded in that quite effectively, and my Firestrike (which I'll probably end up calling "Île de France") is the start of a new mission for me. Now, I am working to get every ounce of performance possible out of dart blasters. One rule: they can't be capable of injury.

So, I have decided to make an arsenal of blasters with muzzle velocities upward of 85 ft/second.
So far, it's just the Firestrike, Pinpoint, and, surprisingly, the Blowsword.

Firestrike

Pinpoint

Blowsword

Also, one project that has been waiting for a long time, since its a bit pricey, is the Earthglider. I built a remote control car that has the agility of a human. it doesn't even get to 22 mph, but it can get up to 15 mph in under 2 seconds. So I put a shortened nerf sword on it, and thats pretty much it. One problem: I need a new battery, since my current one didn't last all that long doing those repeated power surges that are required during acceleration. It's a 500 watt system, and that battery just didn't quite hold out. Some ozone formed inside its cells, and that raised its internal resistance, which lowers its performance even further. I'll probably jack it up to an 800 watt system when I get a new battery for it. This is not a cheep thing to do, the right battery is around $60.

Also, I got myself a Retaliator and a Rapidstrike. The Retaliator has the AR removed and a heavier spring, as well as a different barrel extension. I really got it for the stock barrel, which I put on the Pinpoint. That really pays off.

My rapidstrike.

The Rapidstrike has a 9V upgrade already, and that really didn't do all that much. Eventually, I'm thinking of adding a secondary flywheel set that re-accelerates the darts. I'm not 100% sure if it would work, but I'd say it's worth a shot, at least 90% sure. This would probably just involve getting another Stryfe and extracting the flywheels. Since I want to double the kinetic energy of the dart, that requires some physics calculations.
Let:
S = Speed
Ke =  Kinetic Energy
V = Voltage to Motor
I = Current
P = Power
R = Resistance

First, the two statements that are always true in an electric circuit:
P=VI
V=IR
From these,
P=VV/R
And Newton's Second Law:
Ke=0.5SS
An approximation about the motor:
S is proportional to R

So, we can say:
P is proportional to VV/S

Wait... oh yeah, this one makes it all really quick:
The square of the speed is proportional to the voltage.

(That one I came up with while working on the Earthglider.)

So, adding Newton's second law of motion back in, we can say that:
The voltage is proportional to the square of the speed, which is proportional to the kinetic energy present.
So, since V is proportional to Ke, if I want to double Ke, I should double V.

For those who skipped all that, the second flywheels run on 18 volts.

I just published my response to the technical problems (namely, friction heat melting dart foam) that are the reason that flywheel blasters are so limited in performance.
This is a pretty big breakthrough. The NIC needs to start developing this technology of multiple flywheel sets. It really is going to pay off... seriously, people, get on this. Flywheel blasters and their semi-auto/automatic abilities just need a performance boost. So who's with me?