This is so funny, for me ,As I have been involved with Paintball Industry for a few years now from Wholesale to manufacture and the way forward and talk in the last 3 yrs is to run the PB markers the way the Airsoft guns work . NPS had made a proto type marker that worked like a airsoft gun and here you guys want to go the gas blowback system mecbox route. .:D

Yeh, weird that way.

For those of us who are used to either playing paintball or using remote coils anyhow, this is awesome.

For those of you who are complaining about the remote coil before ever having tried it...

It's really not that much of a burden. I run around, crawl, dive, switch hands, and all sorts of other fun activities with a remote coil and it has never once inhibited my actions so dramatically that I wanted to do away with it.

I find my gear not fitting properly has been more of a pain than a remote coil ever has, and just as likely to get caught on bushes (if not moreso)

Not that I have any reason to convince people to LIKE the idea of remote air, but the more people who buy into good products like these, the more products will come out like them, which I DO encourage.

I'm pretty excited about this new mechbox conversion. This and the AI gas grenades... Mmm... gas...

If the internal tank for the RAP4 can get off a decent number of shots, couldn't one for airsof do even better?

Smaller projectiles, no casing, smaller mechanism? Wouldn't that all consume even less?

No. The RAP4 has no recoil to speak of. Escort guns have massive brass or steel bolts to provide this and moving that amount of mass requires a lot of gas.

Come on people, really. If it were a feasible idea, you don't think it'd have been done by now?

personally, performance comes befor recoil.
if i can get a GBB rifle with a gas mag system the can fire 30rounds, having the addition of recoil is just a bonus. i could care less for recoil if the trade off is a large steel cylender straped to my back. going prone then rolling over the cylender cant be too much fun, much less any good for the back.

Large steel cylinders... now this depends largely on whether you're running CO2 or HPA, and even then it depends on what size tank you're going to run. I've seen some players with large canteens strapped to their belts as a standard part of their kit, and a 45ci/4500psi HPA tank is comparable in size. Regulate that down to 800psi and you're good for several hundred shots before refilling.

Most HPA tanks (HP ones) are regulated to about 800psi anyway. And instead of steel, one can get carbon fiber tanks, much lighter weight. Up to 5000psi from what I've seen.

IIRC the carbon fiber tanks only go up to 4500psi - at 5000psi you'd have to go back to steel, unless there have been some new developments over the past few years.

I keep forgetting about the preset regs... all of my experience in paintball was with adjustable regs, as I had some markers that were tuned and ran optimally at lower pressures.

HPA only really has an advantage in the winter where the termperature won't affect it. To me there's too many disadvantages to using HPA so I stick with a nice 9 oz CO2 cylinder and I'm good for the day.

Oh yeah, I promised pics...

*rummage* *CLICK!* *upload*

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y28...ous/gas001.jpg

The larger one is a 9 oz tank and I get hundreds of shots off of it, probably well over a thousand, maybe closer to two thousand. The 3.5 oz baby is my favorite but I don't use it much 'cause it costs the same to fill as a 20 oz. I can get a couple dozen realcaps off of it I figure. Haven't actually sat down and tested the number of shots but with the Escort mechbox they'll be higher, as there's less mass to reciprocate.

Reg'd CO2 should do fine for airsoft even in winter. Most rigs are reg'd down to pretty low pressure (around 150psi?) which gives a lot of headroom even in cold temps. I think CO2 still exerts around 400psi at around -20C where our trigger fingers start to fall off and all sorts of other stuff starts to go bad.

Pball gobbles a lot more gas than AS so it has worse winter issues. Also, many Pball guns fire from unreg'd CO2 which is prone to temperature drop. If your gun is designed for 800psi inlet pressure, there's no headroom for low temperature performance. If your gun is designed to run at reg'd 150psi there's plenty of space to work with.

You're pretty entrenched in the Escort platform. Why not invest in a basic filling station? I think they can be run off of refillable 20-32oz bottles which is plenty of propellant to divvy up between 3.5oz tanks. I think a basic filling station costs around $100 including a simple hanging scale. Bigger CO2 tanks are pretty common (check your local welding supply) and the refills offer pretty much free gas when you work it out on a per bottle fill basis.

When I owned that Escort, I really wanted to weld a custom CO2 tank with a passthru pipe down the centre. I've always wanted a tank that could be sleeved over the inner barrel with end features to support the sight and connect to the rec'r to make an integrated forearm guard and onboard gas supply.

Well a filling station is about $50 or so, then I need to lease a cylinder with a siphon valve and they only make those in 50 lb. models I think which is about $80, and to fill the tank with CO2 is another $80. I don't use THAT much gas yet. ;)

You can install a siphon valve into any size CO2 tank with a little modification and work on your tank. Alternatively, just hang your source tank upside down.

from my understanding, this would only have semi auto?
I can see people using this for rifles, but a 249 stuck on semi auto would defeat the purpose of an LMG would it not?

Not sure about the escort drop in mechboxes.. but I know Gryphon's gun can fire just fine in full auto...