Adventure Sport Paintball

Insider Advice

Get the most out of your gun

Keep your gun clean. After each game make sure that it is free from any paint or mud:

• A burst pellet in the barrel will result in really poor accuracy and can even prevent your gun firing.
• Your gun hopper contains the paint pellets and feeds them into the gun breach – it must be clean and dry inside. If you have been leaping around (or fallen over) you may have cracked a paint pellet inside your hopper. The remaining pellets will be covered with paint making them stick together and lead to misfeeds and gun blockages. After each game, have a quick look inside your hopper – if there is paint inside, take the hopper off your gun and take it into the Neutral Zone (the hopper not the gun). Grab some tissue and clean up all the pellets and the inside of the hopper.
• If your gun becomes muddy, it can be difficult to grip onto and may also stop the gun from working. If it’s muddy wipe it down after the game.

Don’t pick up pellets from the floor

It’s always tempting to reuse paint pellets that have been fired already or that have been dropped. These look like free pellets but they will usually result in a jammed gun. The pellets have a gelatine shell. This absorbs water really quickly and leads to soft pellets (they will just bounce off) and the pellets will start to swell (they become larger and won’t fall through the hopper or they wont fit into the gun barrel).

If you dropped a few pellets when you were loading your gun and they are still dry and clean, then they will be fine to use – if they dropped into a puddle or mud then leave them.

Don’t run out of gas

The Tippmann 98 guns are powered by compressed carbon dioxide gas. Each gun is fitted with a 20 ounce gas tank that will give you around 800 shots. When the gas starts to run out, the pellets will start to fall short and loose velocity. If this happens ask a marshal to check the gun and if it’s running low they will fit a new gas tank.

The 800 shots per tank applies to every time the trigger is pulled, not every pellet that is fired. A common problem is people dry firing the gun (firing the gun without and pellets) when they are walking back from a game / by the target range. If you dry fire the gun 50 times after each game you are likely to run out of gas at some stage – if this is half way through a game it’s really frustrating as you can’t shoot anyone.

The gas tank has a small on/off valve where it joins the gun. Fiddling with this round knob will not make your gun more powerful – the only thing it will do is stop the gas reaching the valve resulting in low/no power.

Rapid Fire

The Tippmann 98 gun can fire between 5 and 8 shots per second – in the heat of battle however most players will only manage 2 or 3 a second. The gun is semi-automatic, meaning that after every shot the trigger must be allowed to go forward before the gun will fire again – you cannot just hold the trigger down like a machine gun!

Unless you are used to rapidly squeezing a trigger it is hard to get you timing right. The following tips may be useful:

• One shot that hits the target is better than ten shots that miss. Rapid firing is not essential – it may intimidate the opponents (and look cool to your mates), but the game is about shooting the opponent.
• If you are struggling to fire the gun quickly, try using your middle finger instead of your index finger. It tends to be stronger and faster.
• Make sure the pellets are feeding into the gun. Gravity is required to allow the pellets to flow down from the hopper and into the gun breach. If you are leaning around a barricade, with the gun on its side, the pellets aren’t going to run uphill – the gun will make a noise (dry firing) but no pellets will come out. Always hold the gun upright.

Aiming

Unless you aim the gun you are unlikely to hit anything. Firing from the hip may look good in a film but in reality your pellets will fly all over the place.

The gas bottle on the gun forms an ideal gun stock that fits into your shoulder and stabilises the gun. Look along the top of the barrel and this will give you a good idea where the pellets will go. Fire a shot and watch where it goes. If it drops short of the target aim a bit higher, if it’s to the left aim to the right.

This process of “walking” your pellets onto the target is the most effective technique. You can get two or more pellets in the air at a time, watch where they are going and adjust your aim accordingly.