It aint an Evolt but...

[TierOneJeff]

http://toyland.gizmodo.com/our-first...ium=socialflow

I wonder if we could make it shoot .68 and ditch our silly tanks.

[cockerpunk]

paintball could learn a serious amount from nerf.

#notkidding

adopting small, light, round balls as your projectile of choice is not one of them.

[Mahoggers]

Nor is using six C sized batteries. Six!!!!!!!!

[pote]

Ive said this a long time ago, with the newer li-po technology, lower energy requirements for propulsion and the sorta stable availability of paint...50 cal is the way to implement a totally electronic gun. We have the technology, lets use it...

[vijil]

Sounds like a great idea pote, certainly would make paintball more accessible if compressors/co2 become a non issue. Perfect for rentals even, setting up a field would become half the headache. Make the batteries easy to switch out and sell a mass charging rack...

[Pump Scout]

I'd brought up that exact idea a few years ago here, a 50 caliber E-Volt. The response was along the lines of "can't talk about that". I'm going to go out on a limb and think the idea didn't go further than being a good idea.

[PBSteve]

It doesn't seem like a bad idea for renegade ballers, but I'm not sure I see the advantage over a cheap extruded stacked tube and a small steelie for 50 cal.

[Pump Scout]

It would allow a field to sprout up without needing any sort of air system at all. I've kind of eyed that up myself, albeit with small air tanks. Run 50 caliber Spyders, 13ci tanks, and have a scuba cascade system to refill the gun tanks. Something like that wouldn't need an on-site air compressor, which would greatly reduce the start up costs.

The problem, of course, would be the same one that would have come with the E-Volt. That was going to get about 500 shots out of a battery, which compares to a 98 on a 48ci 3000psi tank. Problem there is that with an air tank, when the renter shoots up his first bag of paint, you top off the tank. With a battery powered gun, you'd have to swap out the battery pack, so you'd need two or three batteries for each gun.

[PBSteve]

But your marker unit cost will go up. Then you have to figure in added maintenance for the evolt system built into each gun.

And while electronics are more reliable than pneumatics in many applications, I'm not sure this is one of them. Dead cells, unreliable contacts, fragile molded battery cases... seems like there are more failure points.

[Lurker27]

I feel like the method of compression the evolt uses is a terrible use of DC power:

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/attac...2&d=1426681019

Ideally you want flywheels or something equivalent you can harvest power from and recharge the KE


10bps at 50cal is an energy requirement (napkinning) of 8*10 = 80 watts

So if I spin a flywheel at 80% of no load motor speed to achieve max efficiency (PWM once it reaches target rpm)

Give me a pound of battery let's say, in lithium ion (~125W-hr/kg)
http://www.lifepo4-info.com/wp-conte...gy_density.gif

so
60W-hr capacity
thats
216000 joules
about (6x more than a 68/45 which is ~35kJ)


let's say 80% motor efficiency, cut it in half for spin up, clutch, losses, etc.

let's say door to door efficiency is 25% even, which I think we could probably do/beat

.25*216000/8 >6k shots/charge

so really you might only need a fraction of the battery weight

Of course getting energy from a flywheel to a ball without destroying it is going to be, you know, challenging. I've got some ideas I think could be alright for it though. They tend to look nothing like current guns, though.

I don't know if this is the tech that ultimately came to (not) be the Evolt but this is the only relevant patent I saw haveblue have, and the timeframe is right. But, this is awful

http://haveblue.org/tech/patents/20050188974.pdf