Giga watt?

Anyone who gets the joke of the title is the biggest nerd alive. I'm right there with you, because I thought it up. Anyway, thanks for stopping by. First I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for the brash post I made here against Janga. It was necessary, but Janga and I have a tumultuous relationship, I still love him. I've been trying to think up a new blog post for the past couple days, and again, it took a good conversation with Groove for me to come up with something really fun to talk about. Groove has been turning more and more into my muse lately, I'll have to get him drunk sometime or something. Anyway, I was thinking about the improvement and possible future Nerf could take and all of a sudden it hit me. We could be standing on a opportunity to see the wave of new guns, which would be almost an exact parallel to history. The reason we learn history is to understand what worked and what didn't so we could reproduce the good and avoid the bad. With that said I think the nerf community and the manufacturers alike could learn a valuable lesson and move our sport forward.

The joke in the title branches from the mispronunciation of the word prefix Giga in Back to the Future. They keep calling them Jigga watts, and then branching from my ever reluctant fascination with rap music proved what simply is the best and worst joke I've ever come up with. What the title is relevant to is the fact that we could be looking at the future of our game unfolding before our eyes.

In the last week we've seen some crazy stuff that's gone down which could potentially change our community forever, but will definitely make a big impact. First the re-instatement of Evil into the NHQ mod team, then Boltsnipers spring mag gun, and finally, Lanard has put out a new gun as well. What do all these events have in common with the future of Nerf? Everything.

I'll start off with the Evil part and make it short. When I left NHQ I was very worried. At the time I was getting a lot of critisms for disciplining members, and I was worried that the team was going to allow the newer guys and the over posters to run amok. Not saying anyone on the team is incompetent, but I had concerns. The team really washed their hands of me without so much as a good luck, which while highly insulting, gave me more of a scare of what the future had in store. Again, I'm not saying that the future was unclear, just that I had my own concern. With Evil in place, I know for a fact we have someone who cares too much for the community, which is what's really needed at the ground level, so we'll see what comes of it. I would really appreciate if no one would post comments on this, because my opinion of the situation is unimportant. The point is, the future of NHQ will continue, and it's vitality to the community will for sure be reserved. Please, let this one go.

More importantly, this week, we saw Boltsnipers gun. I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the response it garnered. I really thought we had a community that was inquisitive enough to see the potential in the system. Perhaps we're all so used to the complexity that is Boltsniper, that no one gave it another thought. Not me, I saw a design deep there that could change the face of nerf permanently. What I saw, was exactly what I've always dreamed off out of a nerf blaster. For those of you who didn't get it, think of it this way. What you have is a breach gun really. In his case, he puts a mag in the breach which feeds shells to a chamber that will fire into the barrel. That's astounding that he came up with that, but for a Nerf war, it's rather impractical. Who really has time to fumble around with Mags and shells? I'm not downgrading how amazing his design was, I'm just thinking practically about it. So if you take away the mag, you have a breach, bolt, plunger and trigger. The simplest of Nerf design. The biggest difference is the bolt. I realized while looking at the videos that the Bolt was the plunger tube. So what happens is you push the bolt back which also pushes back the plunger, allowing it the hit the catch. You now have a breach between the bolt (aka plunger tube) and the barrel. This allows you to load a dart into the back of the barrel. Then you move the bolt forward which charges the gun. The plunger is now at the back of the tube and when you pull the trigger, it moves forward, forcing the dart out of the barrel.

It's a spring gun, and works just like our coupler breaches, only there's no coupler. You get to load the dart in the back of the gun without having to fumble with the barrel and make sure it's straight. This not only speeds up the reload time, but it also allows for a more natural movement. Frankly, it's just like the crossbow only increases the rate of fire. This is what I've personally always wanted. A single shot gun that would allow for one movement of charging the gun and putting the next dart in place. It takes out a whole step of reloading. Before we had to prime the gun, remove the barrel, load the dart and then replace the barrel, making sure it was straight. With this design, we prime the gun, load the dart, close the breach. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but if you've ever really nerfed, and you know if you've ever really nerfed, you'll know that that simple process of removing the barrel and replacing it while trying to make sure the barrel is straight literally means whether you're going to take a hit or not.

What I hope to see is that if one of the manufacturers don't pick up the design, we work on a homemade version in the community that we can make sure fires at a moderate level, so we could actually use it in a war. Best case senario, one of the manufacturers picks up on this design. While I was thinking about this, it dawned on me. I've been saying for a while that the X bow has been M1 of nerf. If we could get a rifle sized gun that does what BoltSniper has accomplished, we've seen the our M1 become obsolete for our M14. I know that will be a controversial statement, but so was the idea of decommisioning the actual M1. History speaks for itself.

So days go by and we see something interesting pop up on Ebay. Lanard it seems has put out a new gatling gun. Not only that, but there is rumors that it's spring powered. A spring powered, multibarreled gun could pretty much be the best gun ever made. I can't decide for certain until I can see it, use it and take it apart. What this would be doing though is taking the 3k, which has been almost our SMG of the game, and improving it. I can't speak to much about it, because I haven't seen the gun, but again I saw a link to history.

The Thompson for years was our SMG of choice. Problem was that it was expensive and problematic. There were a lot of moving parts, and a lot of things to go wrong. This is somewhat like the 3k. It's airpowered, which automatically makes it really buggy. Anything running on air power could leak at any moment for no particular reason. The way the military dealt with a problematic gun, was making a simpler one. The M3 otherwise known as the Grease Gun was made to take the place of the Thompson. So to make a long story short, the SL could be our communities next step for gatling type guns.

This is all just random thoughts, take them for what you will. I really do see that history could be showing us something, and we could be moving forward in nerf technology. I hope that with this we may be able to bring new players into the fold and keep the sport alive.

Talio.