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Let me start off with an apology for this novel-length post, but I'm just so happy with how this gun turned out that I wanted to share these results. This past Saturday, I fielded the C8 outdoors for the first time. It's been set up for CQB and shooting 325 with .2, and to date, it had only used it in 2 CQB games. My C7's is my usual outdoor gun, and I did use it part of the day, but the hopup rubber is starting to wear down and it was s giving me trouble with .28 g BBs.
Since all my mags were already loaded with .28 Bastards, I switched over to my C8 that I had brought for backup. Up to that point, the C8 had seen only a bit of short range outdoor action at Op Broardsword in Picton. That was mostly CQB and I was using lighter Velocity Arms .25g BBs. Indoors at CQB range, it was incredibly accurate and effective, but it wasn't very effective at ranges beyond 125 feet as the BBs would either veer off to one side or another or drop to the ground. I was also curious to see how it would handle the heavier ammo, as I had never used anything heavier than .25 in it before.
First stop was the chrony, where with .28, it chronied at a consistent 270-275 fps over 5 shots. Despite the low velocity, I was glad to see it had retained its shot consistency with the heavier ammo. Next was to line up the optic.
Attached was my new real steel EOTech 552 holosight which I was fielding for the first time. The field has a bunker about 100 feet away from the staging area, and there's a chair on the roof. That's what we normally use to align our sights. Once the sight was adjusted, I was able to consistently tag the back of the chair (about 12" x 15") shot after shot. Already at this point, I was most pleased with its accuracy and performance.
The first thing that was noticeable was the trigger response. I recently upgraded from the JG 8.4V battery I was using to a Firefox 9.6V 2200 mAh crane stock battery made from 4/5A cells. This has given the gun an incredibly snappy trigger response and higher rate of fire. The motor is having no issues pulling the light spring with minimal lag and turning it over to the tune of 17 shots per second.
The consistency and accuracy were what impressed me most though. While the BBs did travel quite slow, they travelled completely flat. The hop effect would kick in at about 75 ft out causing the BB to rise a bit, but it would continue to fly in a straight path until it was out of sight. I really have no idea how far the BBs were flying because they were out of sight before they dropped. I didn't really have to compensate my aiming for BB drop at all when aiming. And it did this consistently from shot to shot. Past an estimated 150 feet or so, the BBs would veer off either to the left or right, but until that point, their trajectory seemed perfectly straight and flat.
And the gun didn't let me down in the game either. I managed to make several 125-150 foot kills with a single 3-5 round burst. Normally with my C7 + 3.4x Elcan, I can easily tag a stationary man-size target at 150 feet out. But I never thought the C8 would be able to be that accurate at range without a magnified optic and firing such heavy BBs.
However, there was definitely a down side to the lower velocity. It cost me in the form of penetrating power for foliage. Even though my C7 wasn't working properly, it had little trouble punching through leaves and hitting the target on the other side. The C8 had reasonable penetration power at close range, but didn't fare well at all at longer ranges where the C7 had no issues. So in light of this game, I want to push this gun as close to 350 fps as possible so that I can keep using it for CQB, but also have an even more effective outdoor gun with better range and penetration power.
But all in all, my C8 has now officially surpassed my expectations in every way. I knew I had built a nice solid gun that performed well for CQB, but never thought it would perform this well for outdoors.
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May 9th, 2009, 19:36
, hopefully you keep us posted on the upgrades and how they are working..:tup:
