When I was a kid, someone I knew had a thing that was to foam dart guns what a 4-bore big game rifle is to a Colt Navy revolver--it was this terrifying pump-action thing that shot tennis balls. At one point he tried to build a muzzle adapter for it out of cardboard that would, he hoped, enable it to fire Jarts like rifle grenades, potentially giving him a (literally) lethal indirect-fire capability.

Luckily, the tennis ball mortar thing could not generate enough air pressure to launch anything that heavy farther than about six inches. If he had thought of it, I'm sure he would also have tried to do some kind of fin-stabilized discarding sabot thing with some other potentially deadly missile, such as a regular game-of-darts dart, or a fork, or something.

There's one of these in every peer group...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

When the going gets tough, load the APFSDT (Acquaintance-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding-Tennisball)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

A grocery store I semi-regularly visit has 2000 caps for $3, which for the purposes you probably have in mind sounds amazing. Of course, I live in Texas, which is practically Keraunotopia for anything gunpowder related.

Anyway, my plan to buy an Arsenal ran into a snag; they seem to have vanished from every Walmart I've been to. Who knows whether they'll be back?

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

And now it occurs to me to ask: What does the far future of foam flinging look like? What do 25th century materials and energy science do to the hobby? Even if you do nothing else, plugging an output-limited phaser battery into a 21st century flywheel blaster would probably make it shoot 5 darts a second for longer than its average consumer will live. And I can easily imagine certain motivated individuals in the WDF and/or IPO *coughKeicoughSkuldcough* applying ludicrous amounts of overtechnology to the art of propelling plastic-tipped foam tubes through the air.

"On the one hand, I'm glad you were able to stop that Skyraiders attack that happened during your Nerf war at the public park. On the other, I'm extremely concerned that you didn't even have to change weapons to do so."

However, I'm wondering if the same technology that makes it possible makes it obsolete. Laser tag in particular sounds like a likely competitor. Though it could still have adherents who limit themselves to extrapolations of pre-Contact Earth technology (e.g. lithium polymer in, samarium krellide out). And there's probably enough late 20th-early 21st century nostalgia out there to keep the hobby alive.

The problem with laser tag is that it requires *two* pieces of tech, a blaster and a separate detector, whereas the 'detector' in Nerf et al is just...you. Although I imagine that there's also probably an energy weapon equivalent of airsoft, where the disruptor/phaser/etc is set to "you know you got hit" but not "you're likely to cause damage", so modern laser tag leads to a particular class of individual limping into London Drugs (or whatever the local equiv is) and buying the Big Tube of burn cream every sunday evening.

>to extrapolations of pre-Contact Earth technology (e.g. lithium
>polymer in, samarium krellide out). And there's probably enough late
>20th-early 21st century nostalgia out there to keep the hobby alive.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

That would probably solve the big problems of both airsoft and paintball:

It being an energy weapon means the ammo isn't expensive like paintballs.

It leaving a scorch mark means you don't have rhinohiders going "I didn't feel anything, you must have missed."

I was actually thinking of this, and how Star Wars blasters when set to stun, and star trek phased energy weapons set to *anything* except "make this person not exist anymore" don't actually seem to mark clothing or armour.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

"At Starfleet Academy, the official rule was 'light stun only', but the unofficial rule was that light stun is for the weak. We played phaser tag for keeps."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Btw, I know we've seen someone pop into a New Avalon drug store that was a continuation of a currently going concern, but I can't, for the life of me, recall what it *was*. Anyone have a clue?

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

Boots the Chemists, I think (although they're not called that IRL any more).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

My brain goes -weird- places and now I've begun considering this.

So, we have several extant pieces of overtech in the UF-verse that could be brought to bear on this problem. First and foremost, the ammunition feed issue - there's Gryphon's/The Shadow's .45s, which have an overtech interdeminsional teleportation ammunition feed (a variant on, IIRC, an everlasting pez dispenser) which would solve the hardest problem in nerf warfare - namely, reloading the damn things.

However, darts aren't bullets and don't have their own recoil, so we'd probably want a system similar to That Gun, where a powered revolver setup allows reloading the cylinder at a point opposite the firing chamber (for reasons of keeping the mass of the thing near the hand, where it would be more easily controllable - unlike with the .45s, the rest of the weapon wouldn't have to have appreciable mass, but I can't expect that, even with overtech, you could get a dart teleportation chamber setup massing less than several ounces)

However, once the -concept- of "now I have unlimited nerf" is present - and to deal with licensing issues, because I'm sure Hasbro Galactic wouldn't particularly care to be associated with what is rapidly becoming a serious piece of hardware here, even tho they have 'extreme' marketing - you may want your foam darts to be comprised of, say, cornstarch, so that a hose-down or a light rain would dissolve the evidence of the dart-fight without having to do a whole bunch of very tedious cleanup afterwards.

>
>"On the one hand, I'm glad you were able to stop that Skyraiders
>attack that happened during your Nerf war at the public park. On the
>other, I'm extremely concerned that you didn't even have to change
>weapons to do so."
>

The key is to put enough flak above them that their jet intakes ingest the FOD and flame out fast ;-)

>However, I'm wondering if the same technology that makes it possible
>makes it obsolete. Laser tag in particular sounds like a likely
>competitor. Though it could still have adherents who limit themselves
>to extrapolations of pre-Contact Earth technology (e.g. lithium
>polymer in, samarium krellide out). And there's probably enough late
>20th-early 21st century nostalgia out there to keep the hobby alive.

It's a lot harder for mere mortals to 'dodge' a laser than a dart, which means that agility and other such heroics are more satisfying in a dart fight than a light fight.

At the low end, much like it does now. In the middle of the scale, advances in power technology make for more satisfyingly realistic operation (blowback self-loading actions and what have you), rather like high-end Airsoft guns nowadays. At the top, anything goes. One of the most popular dart guns in the top price bracket ("more than ₢100") is the preposterously expensive Minicator™, which is a ¾-scale Vindicator® rotary cannon that shoots suction-cup darts instead of particle beams. A skilled Minicator™ operator can write words in darts on a sufficiently large and smooth vertical surface.

Another popular variation is to combine it with paintball by replacing the suction cup with a dye packet. Wookiees use this as a training exercise and are mildly confounded by the fact that humanoids like to play it as a sport.

>However, I'm wondering if the same technology that makes it possible
>makes it obsolete. Laser tag in particular sounds like a likely
>competitor.

Beam tag has its fans, but some people find anything that doesn't involve actual physical objects hurtling at their heads unsatisfying.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

In other words, Brain-Pinky: It's NARF or nothing.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

I refuse outright to be even slightly sorry

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Bravo Zulu.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

Obviously a descendant of this product.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Basically, if you've got the magazine pulled out or empty, you can ram just about anything made of foam into it and fire it at pretty decent velocity. Rival balls, Mega darts, even the extremely patented Ultra darts.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)