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Modding Laser Tag Gear?
digitalsushi writes "With summer here again our thoughts turn to the outdoors, and for two years, my peers and I have tried to find plans online for augmenting our laser tag gear to make it more realistic. We're not engineers, but also figured it can't be that hard to do something with some kind of infrared laser to decrease the beam width. What other sorts of inexpensive things could be added to our gear to make it more interesting? We're using the popular Laser Challenge V2 kits, but any brand at all would be interesting."
A bunch of college kids we knew were addicted to playing "Laser Quest, and tried encouraging us (paintball fans) to play.
:)
What a joke.
There's no real incentive not to get shot, besides the lack of points. With paintball you know when you've been hit, because it hurts like hell. Laser Quest's hits resulted in your vest buzzing and your gun not working for a few seconds.
Plus there was no running or ducking in the arena.
Suggestions of wiring eletrodes to the vest to zap players were met with blank stares and hostility. I still think that's the way to go... modify them from "laser tag" to "pain gun tag"
The "Laser Challenge" sets have a bomb that is ordinarily set off with a toggle switch - one direction for slow fuse, another for long fuse. It's a fairly simple hack to rip out the switch and substitute with an SCR and an IR photoresistor to allow remote detonation of the short fuse option. Then you can set minefields and set them off from a safe distance - Laser Geneva Conventions be damned!
Here's a mod i just thought of. Go about your daily business. Provide each player with a locator and a gun. Rig the locators to let you know when an opponent (also with a locator) is within a certain range (ie. 50 yds.). Begin panicked drawing of gun and be the first to find and kill the opponent. You must carry the gear at all times, and you must play regardless of your location, say in a classroom or at a wedding. This might be sweet as a campus-wide game. Even better if you don't know who the opponents are!
Try airsoft. Paintball is nice, but you don't get the real feeling of airsoft.
.25g pellets, and are extremely moddable. I have a Walther p-99, a Colt M-4, and a psg-1. People see me walking out from my apartment and they get afraid.
The basic premise is that the guns are VERY realistic, shoot
In the US, most of the guns have red tips. But you can order the gun from overseas and have the red tip removed once it arrives.
They are also fairly accurate. My M-4 can hit 40 out of 40 at about 20 meters. While not as impressive as paintball accuracy, it gives the game a more in-your-face feel. My psg-1 can hit from 100 meters fairly well...depending on wind.
The pistols use gas charges and fire about 30 rounds between refils. The rifles use electric and can sustain 50 rounds (the limit of my magazine) with no prob and I have shot close to 1000 rounds between batteries.
Seriously, check into it.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
1) Sensors on the gun, that if triggered, disable it for a few seconds.
2) Somehow, build a bunch of smaller sensors, and by this I mean alot. If every person has to wear coveralls that have a few hundred sensors on them, it's alot harder to cheat and just cover yours with your hand.
3) Have a wearable computer that interprets the sensor data. Not sure how to have it affect gameplay, but it seems you could tell the difference between a "kill" and a "flesh wound".
4) If you have an arena of sorts, have sensors on the outdoor lights for night play. Would be cool to "shoot them out".
5) Have lots of little 4" x 4" mirrors up in odd places, for bank shots.
6) Have everyone wear GPS. Send the output to a modified quake server... let people from around the world watch the virtual version of the game.
But as a side note, Laser Challenge V2 makes you wear the receiver on your chest, and its an easy thing to cover the receiver with your arms as you shoot at your opponents. You almost need multiple receivers which can monitor hits from all directions, but who wants to buy multiple Laser Challenge V2 setups for one person.
Paintball turns your entire body into receivers. If you crank down the velocity of your markers, you increase the number of people than can stand ( pain threshold ) to get tagged by a paintball. Remember, safety first ( googles and cups? for our male /.ers ).
Yeah, but what if their option is just to make it more fun? I say: Batteries + leyden jars + an electromagnetic switch triggered by a hit. Make those hits count!
What I'd love to see is an Ender's Game type of thing in which the clothes freeze up in the areas they're hit in, but that would probably be too difficult.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Back when I was in college, and Laser Tag was relatively new, some smart-aleck wag figured out that it was nothing more than a glorified remote control.
He got a programmable remote (a real one, that read another remote's signal, then duplicated it), put the Laser Tag signal into it, and voila! He had the Laser Tag equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun. He could take out several players at once with it. And often did.
I agree, Airsoft is quite a bit of fun. Recently there was a game in California that had over 300 attendees. Many states have growing Airsoft communities that educate players how to have a good time playing the game, without getting thrown in jail for walking around in public with what looks like at best, pistols, and worse, machine guns. Plus, these communities allow members to post local Airsoft Events, there is even a website dedicated to advertising events regardless of location.
As far as price goes, in the US, you can buy a fully-automatic, 1:1 replica (ex: AK47, M16, etc) for $250-$300, add in another $50 for a battery, and then $50 for a good pair of goggles and your major expenses are over. Ammo for Airsoft is typically $15 a bag for 3000-3700 BB's. Quite a bit cheaper than buying cases of paint, and you'll never have to pay for gas refills.
Airsoft *might* be more expensive initially, but the only ongoing expenses are ammunition, which is very cheap compared ot paintball.
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MILES uses real weapons with blank rounds. The MILES laser transmitter clamps into the barrel, so if you do manage to load a live round, you destroy the transmitter and the weapon, but not your target. The "bang" of the blank round triggers the laser transmitter. So you have to lug ammo
and magazines around. All the real-world problems of jams and misfires occur, too.
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If you're hit, it beeps. Loudly. Continously. And you can't turn it off. Only a referee can turn it off.
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If you're hit, you're dead. You're carried off to the "dead" pen. Often, becoming "dead" means an extra 20-mile march or some similar unpleasant detail.
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In the newer versions, beams are coded, and you can tell who hit whom. Soldiers who miss too much get sent to the rifle range for extra training.
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Scores affect your real-life Army career. Why send losers to war?
The latest generation gear uses GPS and data links so that indirect fire weapons can be simulated. But you probably don't need that.The way you describe seems really cumbersome and frankly, dangeous as hell.
It might be useful to look at what is known as a vacuum mattress. This device is used to immobilize patients at accident scenes. It works by pumping air out of a sleeve filled with styrofoam pellets. The sleeve then becomes rigid.
A similar device could be fashioned by creating a sleeve that is worn around a joint, when not under vacuum it would bend relatively easily. Then when a hit was registered, the air could be pumped out renering the joint immobile.
The tricky part would revolve around routing of tubing to a central pump, or the usage of seperate pumps for each joint.
Paintball is not army recruitment, any more than Cops and Robbers is police recruitment, or holding your kid up in the air and playing "Airplane" is Air Force recruitment.
Paintball is a game designed to elicit adrenalin rushes. Put a football linesman up against the opposing team, then send him onto a speedball (tournament paintball) field. It's the same feeling--you know you're going to get hit, but you're trying to avoid it, and even if you do get hit, you'll make the other guy pay for the right to hit you.
Paintball has gotten a bad rap. Go out and play a game. I play at Skyline Paintball; I'll gladly loan you a tournament-class gun (er, sorry, political correctness setting in, "a tournament-class marker"). You'll very quickly see that anyone who plays paintball understands better than the average kid entering an Army recruiter's office that war is hell, and there are times of utter hopelessness in a battle when you have no hope of surviving and are simply awaiting the round that will seal your fate. If that's recruiting for the Army, they'd better come up with something better, quick.
Jouster
even if you have a gun they don't expect, you're still at a huge disadvantage if they already have one pointed at you.
This is certainly true. But carrying a gun is only a small part of concealed carry. The biggest part is situational awareness -- don't let THEM get the drop on YOU. You must be able to ACT, not REACT. When you are reacting, you are behind the power curve and carrying a gun is useless.
If someone pointed a gun at me, I'm not going to draw mine. It would be suicide. But if I'm aware enough to see him starting to go for his before he can draw, THEN I have time to go for mine.
I would also rather lose my wallet than kill someone. Problem is, even after he has my wallet, he might still shoot me. It happened to a gas station clerk not too long ago. The clerk was the perfect victim, complied with all requests, handed over the money, kept his hands in the air... then he got shot for no reason other than the bad guy felt like it.
Always carry chambered! If you're trying to beat the bad guy to the draw, the extra half a second it takes to rack the slide WILL cost you your life.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Firearms ownership is a cultural legacy in the US that can't be wiped out. And in a real world where bad guys are armed regardless of the law, that legacy is actually useful to society. It permits citizens to be personally responsible for their own safety if they so choose. Additionally, and probably more importantly, it allows citizens to have the means to resist the sort of tyrants that in the past have made a large number of countries into horror shows of citizens being abused and murdered by their own governments. Law-abiding citizens who own firearms have caused nothing near the mayhem that governments have historically wrought on their own peoples. So the man who legally carries a firearm and has never harmed anyone isn't the bane of society.
Those of us in the world who have entrusted our governments with the sole power of lethal force are in far more danger than those places where good citizens are trusted to have the ability to defend themselves and their families. History is pretty clear on this.