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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."
You sir are, obviously, not a Slashdot reader :)
Please mod your Tron suit for Laser tag.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Upgrading to the real thing?
;)
Paintball?
Exploding blood packs. And lots of them.
Apply modules that translate sounds into amplified waves of destruction!
Now, to find a word or phrase which has power....
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Have you ever considered airsoft as an alternative? The guns are expensive but they should still be cheaper then getting realistic laser tag gear and a lot more fun. Airsoft uses air to launch small 6mm plastic BBs and they are designed to look like the real thing. Most guns that are sold in stores like Walmart are very cheaply made and not worth your money. I would recommend getting an AEG (Automatic Electric Gun) from Asia (airsoftshop.com, wgcshop.com) but if you prefer to buy from the US I would recommend combatdepot.com. Airsoft can be dangerous so if you play make sure you are wearing proper eye protection (at least ANSI 87.1). Also be sure to inform any neighbors you have as well as the police that you are having an airsoft game. You do not want the police comming to your house and opening fire on everyone they see.
Maybe you should add frickin sharks to your lasers.
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"
Grab a cheap stungun/cattleprod from the next gunshow, rig it to the relay that activates when the light sensor is tagged. Attach leeds from the stungun to the wearee's body.
Viola, now whenever you get tagged not only are you embarrassed but your jiggling and peeing yourself as well. Fun for the whole family.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
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!
My peers and I have tried to find plans online for augmenting our laser tag gear to make it more realistic.
Don't waste time augmenting to make it realistic, just use real guns! Besides, the Stormtroopers showed us that real laser guns are awfully hard to aim.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
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.
IR and RF based...! http://www.oscmar.com (click on products)
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'."
Paintball -- the most fun you can have with your pants on.
Seriously (OK, MORE seriously), you can paintball in many more environments than you can lasertag (plus you avoid the toxic complications of Zombie Smoke), and the (small but undeniable) pain of taking a hit is a far better motivator to stealthy movement and quick reactions than a bit of light.
Cheers,
Rob
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
Well, if it makes you feel any better, when I have kids, I'm going to teach them as much about violence as I can. Extensive martial arts training, stuff like that.
Hey, maybe my kids and your kids can get together and play, and my kids can beat up your kids! Wouldnt that be fun!?
Ok, just kidding. I do fully plan on teaching any/all kids I have as much about self-defense as I possibly can, and that will include extensive training with guns, knives, and "common items" which can be used as weapons in a pinch. I also will be teaching them, from the beginning, the seriousness of what they are learning. There is nothing wrong with letting your kids know how to handle themselves when push comes to shove, just make sure they understand the responsibility that goes with their knowledge.
But maybe that's just me. I always resented my parents for being overly protective in that regard, and not giving me the opportunity to learn how to defend myself - a problem I took upon myself to rectify.
you synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix?
Ive seen it work before. You could probably generate a 6MW beam!
Chris.
I ask for a car and I get a computer. How's about that for being born under a bad
There is just a little difference. The real M16 shoots 5.56mm lead slugs at a velocity of about 950m/s. Airsoft guns shoot 6mm plastic pellets at a velcotiy of around 30-100m/sec depending on gun type. Now not only should it be apparant that the gun won't even shoot 300m, it should be equally apparant that it is far less accurate. He isn't talking about the accuracy of the shooter, rather the accuracy of the gun. For a real fiream, this is nothing special. It should be essentially dead on at 20m. For a plastic BB gun, that's a little different.
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.
We used to play some lasertag in highschool. My personal favorite hack used a magnifying glass and a poster tube to make a long-range sniper-style rifle.
CONSTRUCTION: basically, i took the IR LED and lens off the old gun. securely insert the proper size magnifying glass lens into one end the the poster tube. Insert a plastic cup that fit inside the other end of tube, but can slide forward and backward in the tube.
ALIGNMENT: using a penlight, stuck through the opening in the plastic cup, determine the focal length of the setup. In a dark room, you can project an image of the lightsource onto a wall by adjusting the distance from the cup to the lens. find the proper locationa and mark it.
FINAL ASSEMBLY: put the LED from the gun into the cup at the end of the tube. remove all excess cardboard of the tube. Firmly attach to the gun. (we used duct tape).Go out and test!
RESULTS: basically this allows you to focus the beam more tightly. the downside is that you have less cross sectional area to the beam. this makes things harder to hit. the upside is that you have a more concentrated beam. this means it travels father. In side-by-side tests with fresh batteries, the modified gun shot fully 3 times further, but you had to be DAMN accurate.
get a good optics book (or even a general physics text) for more on the lens setup.
It's called the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, or MILES. It's been in use in the army since the 80's. They even make sensors for tanks and Humvees, as well as individual soldiers. The laser transmitter attaches to the barrel of an actual M-16, and is activated by the sound from the firing of blanks, so you approximate the noise and weapon kickback you would with firing an actual round.
Some links (the second with pictures):
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/miles.htm
http://www.peostri.army.mil/PRODUCTS/MILES/
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Violence is to be avoided. My children will be taught to walk away if possible. They will be taught to RUN away if walking away is not possible. And if running away is not possible then I feel sorry for the bully that picks on them. Provided they are well-adjusted members of society, the people best prepared to deal with violent situations are the LEAST likely to find themselves in one.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
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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.I call 'bullshit.' How would banging the emitters around result in a dramatic power increase? That's just silly.
What you are looking to use is something called a "corner cube" or "retro reflector". It has the property of sending the incident light back in exactly the direction it came from. So your attacker would very effectively shoot himself. You might be able to use some of that retro-reflecting tape that some runners/cyclists use to be more easily seen during dawn/dusk. It is not as efficient as a good quality corner cube, but it doesn't cost several hundred dollars either.
To address the query posed by the lead author, a beam expander will reduce the divergence of the laser beam and "tighten up" the pattern. Again, they are not cheap, you might want to experiment using an old, cheap rifle scope on the end of your weapon as a beam expander.
Enjoy,
-- Instant Karma's gonna get you! [320848 = 2*2*2*2*11*1823]
M.I.L.E.S. (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagment System, in case you were wondering) is horrible. It is awful. It is so atrocious that I can't truly capture its badness except to say that it sucks about as much as a black hole. Don't look into it. Don't consider it. Don't mention it...for gawdsake, don't even think about it.
I have been in the Army for about eight years now and I honestly cannot sum up how much I hate this system. I once told myself, "Self, I think I could be happy doing anything as long as I don't have to wear M.I.L.E.S gear." Since I told myself that I have spent significant time in swamps, deserts and everywhere in-between and I can tell you as a bone fide user that I preferred being in a hostile combat environment where I was getting shot at over wearing that crap in training.
Fortunately for you I find it very hard to believe that you would find any that works on the market, and if you did, the last thing your neighbors or police would want is you and your friends shooting real machine guns at each other with real (blank) ammo and then trying to explain that its just a game.
Stick with Laser Tag...trust me on this one.
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
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.
Paintballings fun (a lot better than laser tag). However for your average player I don't think they'll play by tournement rules. I played laser tag once and the rush is just not the same. you get hit in laser tag you go beep now if you linked up an induction coil the beeper that might be more fun. However in paintballing (tournement syle) if you get hit for a start you're probably going to get a bruse then there's the thought of the other 3 or so balls that are going to hit you straight after the first. Ps if you shoot someone in the balls and the paintball doesn't break you can keep firing until they give up, however when they pick themselves of the ground they might come after you with a big stick (and never do this to a guy who is twice the size of you (I speak from experience)).