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Hellhound Paintball ATV
tuxtattoo writes: "I was talking to a buddy of mine tonight, and he told me about a paintball ATV made by Tippmann.
it's called the Hellhound, and it's got everything you need for a nice day at the paintball field. Some of its features include a variable speed trigger which
is attached to a high speed, 10 barrel, 50 rounds/second cannon.
it also comes equipped with 2 side mounted tippmann model 98's (that would be 2 more paintball guns one on each side :), a 6,000 round hopper, heavy duty winch, and not to forget the what looks to be a self fed grenade launcher. there are many other features that come standard with this model, but NO floor mats or cup holders." I think this has been around for a while, but I played paintball yesterday (and I'm feeling it today) so this submission just seems apropos.
Tippmann has to be the most 'hacker friendly' paintball company out there. How many companies would do free repair work after you have modified(with a dremel) like cutting off the trigger guard(to fit a double trigger) and milling the body?
BTW, if you arn't familiar with current paintball technology, check out the equipment at a place like http://www.countypaintball.com or http://www.paintballgear.com . Some guns (the Angel) can be connected to and programed via a serial port.
All I want to know is "where can I get one?"
Obviously this ATV is pretty darn cool but I don't see how it could be used in a game situation without making the odds against "infantry" grossly unfair.
Well, the infantry can feel free to use their paint-filled, shoulder-launched missiles, not to mention their fully stocked paintball bombers with rainbow cluster bombs.
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being an avid paintball player and what not I've seen this thing in action many a time and no its not for sale, mainly tippmann takes it to big games and tourneys and allows it to be used in free for all games(non tourney legal)
Its got everything they could need if it was covered in plexi-glass. Not only is it fast for getting the hell out of dodge, but the fill the paintballs with a peppery liquid and you have the ultimate crowd repellent. Basically an awesome and mobile extention on current paintball based crowd control weapons. Coming to a WTO meeting near you!
Imagine a remote-controlled blimp or dirigible with a regular paintball gun mounted on it, and a video camera. Quiet enough for recon, packs a punch, wouldn't unbalence the game TOO much, and could also allow a VERY high level of tactical/strategic oversight by team commanders.
I'm the stranger...posting to
if it's street legal. THAT could be fun. I'm sure you'd have no problem with traffic sporting what looks like a practice tank for the army.
No sig for you.
I've been playing paintball for almost four years now, and I've known about the Hellhound for almost two. It's already pretty well known in my circles (most paintballers over 25 seem to work in the IT industry anyway). I'm pretty upset that I could have submitted this article two years ago, but I felt it had no place on Slashdot.
u reshop.cgi?action=now&now=mortar.htm&order_id=1318 19899. Keep in mind, this is not the same paintball company as Dennis Tippman Jr.'s page, different organization entirely. Quarter mile range. 75 foot blast diamter. This company also makes claymores (the curved "charges" that say "this side towards enemy") and landmines for paintball.
i pp98wgrenades.html. More accuracy, and it's a great finishing touch when you bunker someone point blank... if you don't mind taking yourself out in the process.
Anyway, they do have paintball mortars - look at http://www.tippmannordnance.com/cgi-bin/store/sec
Getting back to the original Dennis Tippman Jr., he also manufactures grenades. While the Hellhound launches them via a spring loaded arm (hard to aim, and blast diameter in only 10ft.), true grenade launcher afficionados should consider an I&I CO2-powered grenade launcher - http://www.iisports.com/iisports/paintballstore/t
While you guys are on Tippmans' page, take a gander at the Flatline - nice piece of engineering. In paintball, your shots are not allowed to go faster than 300 fps, 280 at some fields, even less on indoor fields. So, the designers at Tippmann created this barrel to put a backspin on the ball, giving it longer range without violating the velocity limit. We tend to call them "floaters", since the rounds seems to act like frisbees once they leave the gun (even to the point of occasionally moving off-course). Unfortunately, the act of putting a backspin on the ball places a lot of stress on it, so you'd better not be shooting the cheap thin-shelled crap that you can buy for $20/case.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Paintball today is all about how much ammo you can get downrange, not about skill, stealth or cunning. I know I'll sound like an oldtimer here, but when *I* played the game in the early 80's, we had Nelspot 007's, little hand held pistols. You carried three 10-round tubes onto the field and a couple of extra C02 cartridges. One cartridge would shoot about 15 rounds. At then end of the day, we would often have rounds left over. The game was about sneaking around, tactics, and the occasional firefight with a completely manual pistol that was innacurate as hell and had to be cocked by hand. EACH SHOT HAD TO COUNT.
We also used oil based paint, since that's all that was available in those days. A hit on the skin was a mark for a couple of weeks. Right about 1984 was when the water-based stuff hit the market.
Paintball ATV's like this are a continuing sign that the game is all about rounds per minute now.
-sigh-
Oh, and we had to walk five miles through the snow to get to a paintball game. Uphill. Both ways.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. -
I've often thought of bringing out the ATVs for paintball. (or snowmobiles for winter games)
Just put two people on each machine, one driver and one shooter and fire away. We usually play paintball out in a gravel pit so the ATVs would be nice.
By the way, for those of you who haven't played paintball in a gravel pit, it is definitly the best place I've ever played. There is a good mix of wide open space and sniper places as well as the gravel hills you can get up on.
1. Paint Can Mortar. Take a can of your favorite brand of paint and drop it into the mortar. It launches it up to a mile away. Of course, the can hitting an opponent can leave a mark, but you KNOW you hit him.
2. Paint Flame Thrower. Fill a tank with paint of your choice. Feed the paint into a high pressure washer. You get the idea. Just regulate the stream so that you don't cut someone in half.
3. Paint Throwing Stars. Dip a paint brush into a can of paint and fling it at someone. Fast, effective.
4. Paint Booby Traps. Dig a 6 foot deep pit, install sharp stakes at the bottom. Dip the tip of each sharpenned stake into paint (to keep it legal). Very effective.
5. Paint Carpet Bombing. Fly a B-52 over the gaming area and drop 20,000 cans of paint. Sure to make your enemies sit up and take notice.
Anyone think of others?
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
I used to play large scale scenario games a few times a year. Hundreds of players per side, on hundreds of acres. Games would typically last 12 to 24 hours, with two "armys" and often with several smaller factions. Points were earned not for eliminating your opponents, but for holding key locations, capturing enemy forts, or capturing or eliminating an enemy officer or VIP. Being eliminated usually meant you sat out for 15 to 30 minutes, which can be a big deal duringa major offensive. Some games had a medic rule, where the medic could wipe off anything but a head hit. Usually you had one medic, and if they were eliminated, you lost them for an hour, or you had to spend earned points to buy a new one.
Anyway, these are the kinds of games where you see guys riding ATVs, helicopters on loan from the military or the local news (helicoptor is not a legal target. You just have to run and hide until it's out of ammo.) Night vision goggles, retired Motorola techs with his 2 teenage sons running an outpost with radio scanners and jamming gear..
If you're not a fan of tourney style paintball, you should check out scenario games. That tourney player who carrys a case of ammo on his back to fire during a ten minute game has to rethink his strategy or go broke (or more likely suffer a heat stroke) if he has to do it for 24 hours straight. There's just nothing like crawling across a field towards an enemy held fort in the pitch black of night, with your team in a ditch 20 yards behind, and the other team 20 yards ahead, trading insults, the occasional volly of paintballs, and million+ candle power spotlights.
It looks from the photos that the minigun is powered ENTIRELY by a commercially available electric hand drill. The drill chuck turns the mechanism and it looks like there's some sort of chain drive connecting the mechanism to the ammo feeders. Most of this is probably obvious to those of us with rudimentary meatspace-hacking (aka. mechanical) ability. So... how long before others start building with this design? :-)
:-) Wow. If you made it with only 3 barrels (or 2 like some helicopter cannon) and stepped the rate down to maybe 3-5 rounds/s, you'd still have a formidable (but human-luggable) weapon ^H^H^H^H^H... marker which wouldn't break the bank on ammo :-)
At 50 rounds/second and a 6000-round hopper, the minigun runs out of ammo after only, um, 2 WHOLE MINUTES of sustained fire
Freedom: "I won't!"
Most of my paintball experience has been around active duty military members. Military training and paintball have suprisingly little to do with each other.
To begin with, I had a non-combatant role in the US Air Force. I fixed electronics systems on aircraft. I would get annual training on an M16 - probably so that I don't end up using it as a club if the unthinkable happens and I actually have to USE one (and then we're all in pretty serious trouble anyway). My entire team was, mostly, non-combatants. We took top positions in each tournament we played. These tournaments included teams consisting solely of combat-trained individuals.
One of those teams were a great group of Army guys in K-Town (hey HAWGs). We would drive over for weekend pick-up games with their group on their paintball area. It was common to hear them complain about the previous weeks' field training and how they were glad to be playing some paintball to get away from all that.
Lets go back over that point. Paintball was a break from military training. The game was a break from, as close as the Army could get, the real thing.
Sure - military and police units do use paintball equipment for limited training. There's something psycologically distinct about solid projectiles flying around compared to laser light beams. But when paintball is used, it involves very specific scenarios and sometimes unique equipment.
And then there's the danger of picking up bad habits. A piece of plywood or a bush makes adequate paintball cover. It offers little aid against a firearm.
I'd like to point out that our paintball team in Germany used paintball tactics. Combat tactics (used by a lot of teams with combat-trained members) didn't fare well in paintball and I'm sure paintball tactics wouldn't work well on a battlefield.
There have been a range of articles going over the "war" nature of paintball. Something about the simulated danger of the activity. Tapping our desire for adrenaline, conflict, and aggressive nature. I've pondered about it too. But in the end its all academic.
Paintball is simply fun. Its a game. And while it may have some simularity to more martial issues, that comparison is simular to those that can be made of chess or risk. Heck. Sports such as kendo or fencing have truer ties to martial arts than paintball. And even those ties are shadows.
After 9/11 I realised that (a) it is possible that this war will see no end for a long time (b) we'll need help.
So. In a few months, I'll be a network admin for the US Army. It's a nice ride.
If you think your boys might eventually be drafted (which isn't terribly likely to happen), the last thing you want to do is keep them from the skills they'll need to stay alive. And, meanwhile, have fun with them.
An out of sight, out of mind mentality doesn't work very well against something as blind as the draft.
Kid-proof tablet..
Another reasonably successful commercial gun using a, more or less, clip system was the ATS TS1 (which has spawned a series of updated models). This paintgun has a forward hopper slung under the barrel and doubling as a grip. It feeds paintballs to a very obvious clip. The clip itself holds something like 25rnds and feeds the paintgun through a kind of converyer belt system. It is also available in select fire and semi-auto only models. Again - the technology is unique to this marker.
There are also a series of trainer and "sidearm" paintguns out there. They tend to be limited to between 10 and 25 rnds and spring-fed. Usually semi-auto and often pistols (though I understand there are some M-16 replicas that are sold solely to training facilities).
Modern feed systems these days are still gravity fed. The difference is that they use agitators and sensors to keep the well stocked with paintballs. These kinda-almost-positive feed systems are required by today's fast-paced semi-auto paintguns who boast rates of fire that meet full-auto paintguns... assuming the human trigger finger can keep it up.
Semi-auto paintguns are found solely in the realm of scenario games... if even there.
When it comes down to it, clip fed systems are not really required. Paintballs are round; they don't need to be chambered in any particular way. Gravity feed works rather well assuming the paintgun is being held more or less upright and the feed system has been appropriately designed (which is a given in most modern paintguns). Agitated feeders help keep those feeds going. And finally, gravity fed hoppers are able to hold considerably more rounds than any clip system - unless you get in to drums which I understand induce considerable problems of their own.