The Combat Game of Airsoft Trivia Quiz

Answer: You feel it.

When playing Airsoft you should cover up, as being hit on bare skin can be painful. Watch that you don't overdress, though, or you may not feel yourself being hit. Due to the high degree of professionalism, any disputes about hits and misses are expected to be settled politely or through the game marshal. Violent behaviour and abusive language are frowned upon in the sport.

During play, especially during military simulations or historical re-enactments, players are encouraged (sometimes expected) to dress accurately. Some outfits can be quite thick, and if you are in doubt of being hit, you should assume you were and settle the details later. That being said, because airsoft pellets are fairly light, they tend to bounce a great deal after striking a hard surface. Ricochets do not count as hits.

Answer: Hold up your hand or weapon and call loudly, "I'm hit!", then walk out.

Airsoft uses the honour system, as players don't use paint-filled rounds or any other method of marking their hits on enemy players. It has been argued that Airsoft requires a higher level of professionalism compared to, say, Paintball, because of this.

Many Airsoft guns that are made are accurate looking replicas of real firearms, and in many places you need a special permit to possess these due to their realism. Because of this, many people who play Airsoft are people with such licenses such as police and military personnel, who generally have a high degree of professionalism. Because accurate airsoft replicas can be made, it is common to see them used in police training exercises.

Answer: Eyes

Most humans these days, along with many other animals, have these two big, round, delicate, squishy (and sometimes pretty) things set in their skulls called "eyes". They have receptors in them that react to electromagnetic radiation in the spectrum of 400nm to 700nm (conveniently called the "visible spectrum".). Because they had to be exposed to light, it was very inconvenient to cover them up, but in the old days when we were still banging around with swords and shields, it didn't seem like much of a problem. Then, eventually, a few sports were created that involved blasting each other with little projectiles (this can apply to Paintball, too), and a few people started to notice that, while these projectiles posed little threat to a majority of the epidermis, these "eyes" on the front of peoples' faces were a bit of a problem. If a little tiny pellet traveling at up to 500 ft per second (152.4 meters per second) were to hit this pathetically squishy organ, then some serious damage could be done. Thus, it was decreed that players of any sport involving high-velocity projectiles must wear sufficient eye protection during play (glasses won't cut it; the pellet could still slip under).

While eye protection is the only mandatory protection, it is also recommended that you wear ear and mouth (read "tooth") protection as well.

The reason I used 152.4 m/s above is because in my home country of Canada, anything faster, or anything that can give a pellet more than 5.7 joules of kinetic energy, is considered a real firearm (not just a replica).

Answer: Water

Spring guns are usually rifles and shotguns, and a few grenade launcher attachments. These are usually the cheapest kind of gun to buy. They are called spring guns because the user has to manually cock the spring.

Electric guns are mostly fully automatic assault rifles or machine guns, though there are a few electric pistols.

Gas guns are mostly semiautomatic pistols, though all kinds of gas-powered weapons exist.

Another note on gas guns is that there are three prominent kinds of gases. Ranging from weakest to strongest they are: HFC134a, green gas, and red gas (HCFC-22). All are being phased out for environmental reasons. CO2 guns do exist but they require changing the air supply more often. Also, some guns are made more realistic by having a blowback feature. This uses extra gas and will deplete your gas source faster.

Answer: 6 mm

6 mm is the standard diameter of an Airsoft pellet, though firearms that use 8 mm pellets are also made. The weights of the pellets can still vary greatly. The light 0.12g pellets are used in lower-end firearms that can be purchased at hardware stores. 0.20g pellets are considered by many to be the "standard" weight. Some snipers prefer heavy rounds, like the 0.36g pellets. The heavier the pellet, the more hop-up it needs to fly straight. Heavier pellets generally fall faster, decreasing their range, but are not moved by wind as easily, making them more accurate (which is key to sniping). There are many other weights from 0.12g to 0.48g that can be used for different occasions.

4.5 mm is the diameter of most bb gun barrels, while 0.68 inch is the standard diameter of a Paintball barrel.

Answer: No

Spring guns are usually the cheapest type of gun you can purchase because it has the simplest mechanism. Between each shot you must manually compress the spring and chamber another pellet. For this reason spring guns are never fully- or semi-automatic. Cheap guns usually involve the pistols that you can buy at your local hardware store, or low-end pump-action shotgun replicas. Higher end spring guns usually include pump-action shotguns or bolt-action sniper rifles.

Answer: No

There are many bolt-action sniper rifles and pump-action shotguns that still use compressed air in order to gain more power instead of manually compressing the spring like in spring guns. Usually there are not electric versions of these guns.

Answer: Yes

Paintballs do exist for Airsoft, but are not recommended. They can burst inside the barrel of a gun which, at 6mm, can be a pain to clean. Higher end guns with more power (not just from your hardware store), or guns with more complex feeding systems will most definitely get this result. Because the pellets are extremely frail, they can burst when being chambered, and cause the weapon to jam. Professional players do not use paintball rounds at all, and instead rely on the honour system when playing.

Answer: Daniel Bernoulli

In order to fully understand what is happening to a pellet when you apply a back-spin, you will have to get out your old physics text books and read up on Bernoulli's Principle and the Magnus Effect. However, here's the simple version to help you understand hop-up a bit better (if you don't already).

First of all, you have a ball flying through the air with a back-spin (it's spinning in the opposite direction that a car's wheels would turn relative to the forward motion). When you have a spinning object in a fluid (or gas) it spins a bit of the medium with it (air around the pellet moves around it in the same direction as the spin). The best way to picture this in your head is to have the air move across the pellet instead of the pellet moving through the air.

Now you have to add the air flows together. On the bottom of the pellet the air flows will be working against each other, causing an area of slower moving air. Conversely, on the top of the pellet, the two air flows add together, creating faster moving air.

Bernoulli's Principle says that faster moving liquids (including gases) exert less pressure, while slow moving liquids exert higher pressure. Because the shape of the pellet does not change (cross-sectional area is a constant), and pressure is force divided by cross-sectional area, there is a direct relationship between pressure and force.

Okay, so we have slow moving air on the bottom (slow air = high pressure = large force up) and fast moving air on the top (fast air = low pressure = small force down). See where this is going? We get a net pressure force acting upwards to counter the ever-present gravitational force downwards, which should result in a flat trajectory of your pellet.

You can apply too much hop-up. In this case, the pressure force will be greater than the gravitational force, and the pellet will veer upwards. The idea is to set the hop-up just right so the pressure force equals the gravitational force. That being said, many snipers like to add a bit of an upwards arc to their pellets' trajectories to increase the overall range while not compromising accuracy.

Answer: True

Right. Here's some more info on hop-up.

To apply a back-spin to a pellet, the hop-up is just a small rubber nub that presses down on the pellet when it's in the chamber. When the pellet is fired, then the rubber holds to top part of the pellet a bit longer than the bottom, which just slides along the smooth barrel. "What could possibly go wrong?" you ask.

Well, consider this. Your barrel may have a diameter of 6.00 mm while your pellets have a diameter of 5.98 mm. There's a little wiggle room, it seems. Now, the hop-up involves holding the pellet between two points: the hop-up nub, and the bottom of the barrel. But because there's that tiny space, if the pellet were not chambered properly (say the gun was tilted at the time), then the hop-up would not put on a completely vertical back-spin (remember all that stuff from the previous question?). Well, if the back-spin is not vertical, then the pressure force acting on the pellet will have a horizontal component. The pellet would veer off sideways and would not stay in the air as long (because the pressure forces would not line up with the gravitational forces).

That's where the V-notch comes in. The V-notch is a nub with TWO points of contact. So we then have two points on the nub, and one point of contact at the bottom of the barrel. Now if the pellet is loaded at an angle, it's still pulled into the correct position for firing.

Remember, because hop-up can only spin the pellet in one direction, in order to achieve the desired effect, you have to fire your Airsoft guns completely vertical (don't tilt them along the axis of the barrel). This also means that hop-up only affects the range and vertical accuracy of the pellet, and does nothing to prevent the pellet from being blown horizontally by wind.

In some games where range is not an issue, players will disable the hop-up completely. Then, no matter what angle the pellet is loaded or fired at, it will follow a predictable parabolic trajectory (the operative word being "predictable").