Chris Schneck

If playing paintball in the woods is your thing, you undoubtedly own something in olive drab or some other easily available camouflage pattern. Camouflage has been evolving since the beginning of the predator prey relationship, with survival being its only purpose. Human adorned military camouflage and the science of visual acuity have only been around since the mid 19th century, but our big human brains have learned much.

The sole purpose of camouflage is to break up and conceal the recognizable geometric shape of an object with its surrounding environment. Camouflage makes an object difficult to detect by emulating the immediate visual background. The colouring, size and distribution of pattern elements must necessarily be in aspects pertinent to the visual system of the observer.

So literally the best camouflage is one that looks as similar as possible in all aspects to your immediate surroundings in both colour and pattern.

There are all kinds of terrains and climates with their own flora and fauna, it will be nearly impossible for you to own the perfect camouflage for every event and locale. Even if you do own a pattern that matches the surroundings that you normally play on, are you using your camouflage in such a way that it breaks up the recognizable geometric outline of the human body? Regardless of your body being covered in a sufficient visually disruptive pattern, what about your mask and marker? If anything is going to give you away while playing woodsball its going to be thundering around like a fool, the silhouette of the visor on your mask, the mask itself or the silhouette of your marker.

Movement, or lack of movement, is very much a part of effective camouflage. You’ve most likely seen pictures that demonstrate a particular camouflage patterns capabilities and there’s one thing that all these pictures have in common. The concealed subject isn’t moving! On top of a still picture not recreating the movement of a natural environment the concealed subject in the demonstration pictures is, 90% of the time, not carrying any paintball gear! As long as you remain motionless, theres less of a chance your mask or marker will give you concealed position away, but as soon as you raise your marker to take aim, or poke your head up to see whats going on, its pretty much all over.

There is one expensive solution that might be practical depending on your style of play, the ghillie suit, aka the ‘yowie suit’. This form of camouflage first made an appearance in 1916 during the second Boer War and is named after a type of tree spirit that is supposed to disguise itself in leaves and vegetation. A ghillie suit is often comprised of several pounds of jute thread, and is incredibly hot to wear. Since these suits take a considerable amount of time to manufacture, they are often also expensive. Although highly effective, the ghillie is only as capable as its wearer, again movement will give you away even if you are head to toe looking like a mossy swamp thing.

So which easily available camouflage pattern is the best? How much do I have to pay and who do I have to go to, to get the best camouflage?

It’s been my experience that as long as you are wearing a natural and abundant colour, like the very common olive drab, and you pay attention to how you move and your position in your surroundings in relation to potential objectives you’ll regularly surprise people. Stay low, move cautiously and with intent, crawl often as people aren’t expecting that. Don’t second guess yourself, once you’ve decided to move, commit to the movement. Use brush as cover, as long as there is 2 or 3 inches of foliage between you and a potential hotspot you are less likely to be seen, natural cover is the best!

Sound is also an integral part to camouflage, shut the hell up and remember to practice and use your hand signals or invest in some radios and headset / mic combos. Combat boots are nice, I wear them, but running shoes are quieter and should be considered as an alternative.

In the end the camouflage is only as good as the person wearing it, very much like a paintball marker is only as good as the person operating it.

The Myth : A frozen paintball is a hard paintball.

What I think : Because of the ingredients that go into making paintballs, I don’t think they will freeze and become hard as rock. I think they will shrink, become dimpled & deformed and will overall be very useless. 

Make sure to read : Paintballs - A tasty treat

I’m going to prove how freezing paintballs will effect them by sacrificing a bag of paint and putting it in the freezer over the weekend. The paint is new, non winter formula and in an airtight sealed bag.

The paint was put into the freezer on Friday, February the 1st @ 1pm.

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I retrieved the bag of ‘frozen paintballs’ from the freezer on Monday, February the 4th @ 10am.

Ready for a surprise? The paintballs were NOT rock hard, they were in fact a little squishy-er and extremely brittle. So brittle in fact I’d say they would be near impossible to use, even in the most gentle of paintball markers. The shell was not hard, and the fill was still very much a fluid. I would not be afraid of playing against someone who said they had frozen their paintballs, in fact, id encourage them to use them as I don’t see how their marker will function for very long with all the broken paint in their breach.

I will admit, there might have been a time when paintballs could have been freezable, but the general recipe for modern paintballs doesn’t seem to contain enough water to make them dangerous or near lethal. So the next time some one starts going off about how they froze some balls and it was rad, you can call them out and get everyone to laugh at them for being a big fat liar.

Both the BT Apex barrel and the Tippmann Flatline barrels work in much the same way to increase the distance your paintball will travel, but are physically much different in design. Before the paintball leaves the barrel friction is intentionally applied to the top of the paintball creating backspin, also known as underspin, such that the paintball rolls backwards as it travels towards your intended target.

This phenomenon is known as the Magnus effect, whereby a spinning object creates a whirlpool of rotating air or liquid about itself. On one side of the object, the motion of the whirlpool will be in the same direction as the windstream that the object is exposed to. On this side the velocity will be increased. On the other side, the motion of the whirlpool is in the opposite direction of the windstream and the velocity will be decreased. The pressure in the air is reduced from atmospheric pressure by an amount proportional to the square of the velocity, so the pressure will be lower on one side than the other causing an unbalanced force at right angles to the wind. The overall behaviour is similar to that around an aerofoil with a circulation which is generated by the mechanical rotation, rather than by aerofoil action.

A seemingly mystical defiance of gravity is the result, with paintballs traveling in a relatively flat line instead of a traditional arc. As explained above, this is becuase the direction of the spin placed on the paintball creates a lifting force. The solid ( paintball ), spinning backwards through the fluid ( air ).

Ive personally had a chance to use both the BT Apex barrel and the Tippmann Flatline barrel, on both Tippmann 98’s and Tippmann A5’s, and im truly torn between the two. They are both excellent choices, they both do as they claim, but in the end i think the BT Apex barrel is the better choice.

I currently own a BT Apex Barrel on my Tippmann A5. The older models like mine have a .692calibre bore size, however recently BT has changed the Apex to be a slightly smaller .689 - .69calibre. Mimicking Flatline performance is quite easy with the sliding switch on top of the barrel end ( I use setting 4 or 5 ). Drop shots work amazingly! hook shots left to right arent so hot, but it still works. It installs like a regular barrel, cleans like a regular barrel and isnt at all picky about what paint you use. However the more brittle the paint, the more you should ease the slider on the top back, as too much pressure from the rubber paddle inside will liquify paint thats too brittle.

The Tippmann Flatline barrel is no less formidable. Like my older BT Apex, the Tippmann Flatline is a .692calibre. There nothing fancy going on here and as soon as you’ve installed it correctly you’re ready for long shots. It can be a pain to install, its definitely a pain to clean and there’s definitely no adjusting the amount of spin you want to put on the ball. It looks just as bad ass as the apex, I personally think more-so on the Tippmann 98, and the distance for straight out long shots is just as good.

For optimal performance out of either of these barrels, remember to chrono your marker to around a stable 260fps.