The Scoop on .50 Caliber Paintball, A Paintball X3 Exclusive

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The Scoop on .50 Caliber Paintball, A Paintball X3 Exclusive

Written by Administrator

Wednesday, 21 October 2009 08:58

At the 2009 PSP World Cup in Florida, the most popular and most-visited booth in the trade show was the home of GI Milsim. Their .50 caliber paintballs, markers and accessories were the talk of the show and have since created a buzz around the industry like that not seen since the introduction of constant air, semi-automatics and electronics. Some believe .50 caliber paintballs and equipment may be the next evolution of the game, others refuse to even give the idea a moment's thought and many players are caught in the middle, unsure whether .50 or .68 caliber will be the future of the game. While PaintballX3 does not have a crystal ball, what we do have are editors who have played the game for many years and can separate facts from rumors and hype to allow players to make an informed decision on whether .50 caliber is for them. Love it or hate it, at least judge .50 caliber on facts instead of fiction.

Part One of Four, The INTRO

By John Amodea and Josh Silverman

What this article series is and is not: With this article series it is our goal to present you the facts as they relate to .50 caliber’s performance and to compare the performance to .68 caliber paintballs. We also hope to put the entire .50 caliber movement into its proper perspective. Is .50 caliber going to replace .68 caliber? Can the two co-exist? We’ll attempt to answer questions like those in this series. We’ll have quotes and insight from others in the paintball industry and we’ll take this step by step for 6 weeks. What we will not do in this series is tell you which caliber is better. We won’t be testing the guns as much as the paint (although some of the testing will show the marker’s abilities). And we’ll leave it to you to decide if .50 caliber is for you.

Background

Click HERE to read an exclusive interview with .50 Caliber’s originator Richmond Italia.

Click HERE to read what some in the paintball industry think of .50 caliber.

At First Glance

A first look at .50 caliber paintballs raises many questions and points. It’s very easy to see how much more economical .50 caliber can be just by looking at the size of the ball. But can a ball that small really perform similarly to a .68 caliber ball as it is being claimed by the manufacturer? Is there a complete industry-wide changeover coming? What happens to the thousands of dollars worth of .68 caliber gear that I own? Will fields allow both .50 caliber and .68 caliber in the same walk-on games? These are just a handful of the questions we plan to answer and/or discuss in this series.

Take a look at the handful of paintballs. It’s pretty easy to get a feel for how small a .50 caliber ball is when it’s sitting next to a .68 caliber ball. Now take a look at the two cases of paint—pretty easy to tell which one is the .50 caliber case, right? An interesting downhill trickle effect of the smaller ball is a smaller “everything.” The ball is smaller, the hopper is smaller and to a degree, the marker is smaller. For this INTRODUCTION we used one of GI Milsim’s FM50 markers.

To get a feel for how the FM50 and the paint shoots, we took it out to a target range and fired a few hundred rounds. We chronographed the marker in at around 280 feet per second and the first thing we noticed is there is zero kick with the FM50 shooting .50 caliber paint, which is not entirely surprising. The feel of marker was not much different than .68 caliber, but you’ll probably never confuse the two. There are clearly some differences in the ball flight at long distances, but we’ll have some very real data and statistics later in this series on that.

Having a smaller and lighter hopper on the marker is definitely a plus when sighting in your shot targets. Carrying a half case of paint (1000 rounds) onto the field will be no problem as well—a nice side-effect for those that play in the back on tournament fields or for those that play big games and scenarios.

Breaking Paint

Shooting .50 caliber at a hard target showed us that the paint has a nice “break size,” clearly larger than a “quarter” consistently. Looking at the photo with the two splats you’ll see the (green) .68 caliber splat is larger than the (yellow) .50 caliber splat—but not by much. We also noticed that more of the actual paint from a .50 caliber ball stays on the target than with .68 caliber. The efficiency there is probably a little better than .68 caliber, but photographers may be a bit disappointed because the valuable “splat shots” will be few and far between with .50 caliber.

Coming next week in Part TWO we’ll begin to answer some of these questions:

1. Does .50 caliber break on target as consistently as .68 caliber, especially at longer distances?

2. How accurate are .50 caliber paint and markers?

3. How many shots will I get from a C02 or HPA tank fill?

4. How does .50 caliber compare on the field to .68 caliber?

We’ll have data, statistics and video in the next installments.

Thanks for reading.