Internals and measurements

Reliability testing

For stock chrono numbers and another person’s opinion on the blaster, here’s Coop’s review.

To summarize: The Sportsman is surprisingly reliable given that it is a hopper-fed dart blaster with a breach with a failure rate under normal conditions of only 3%, which is something that we had previously assumed would be impossible. However, “surprisingly reliable” is not the same thing as “very reliable.” I’d recommend the Sportsman for superstock games and/or as part of an integration but it would not be good to count on to stun a charging zombie in HvZ.

This was originally posted to Reddit (and is being reposted here because Spez is a very naughty boy); some good points were raised in the comments. I’ll copy/pate them here.

/u/LightningEagle14

3% failure rate sounds perfectly acceptable for most situations, and honestly probably good enough for hvz. The thing that appeals to me the most about this blaster (and that is making me heavily consider purchasing one) is how easy others have found it is to convert it to a sealed breach. I remember seeing a couple posts about that, and the performance was superb. 140+ fps on the stock spring. A 140 fps blaster that doesn’t use magazines would be great for superstock games. https://www.reddit.com/r/Nerf/comments/ia2kwc/adventure_force_sportsman_brass_breech_mod/

/u/Herbert_W

Keep in mind that reliability goes down dramatically when pumping the grip rapidly. This would be good for plinking distant zeds but defensively it’s pretty poor.

While this is subjective, even 3% is too high for me when a single failed shot could end an in-game life that lasts a week and happens once a year. I love playing as a zombie, but dying due to equipment failure is pretty frustrating. I’d much rather die due to a zombie doing something clever.

This leads me to wonder what effect a brass breech would have on reliability. The stock breech has a little bit of chamfering at the lip of the chamber and a brass system could be made to roughly the same shape, so I’d assume that the effect on reliability would be small.

Worth noting: as I pointed out in another comment, the hoppers could be made to be removable. A brass breech would be a natural fit for this sort of mod.

/u/torukmakto4

Excellent testing rigor to say the least! It actually did surprisingly well.

A situational that comes to mind with casual HvZ use is that people in the bad old days often didn’t know how to manage magfed systems or that leaving a mag loaded for a week (or a year!) is bad.

I once felt a random heebie jeebie that led me to idly take the mag out of a rifle belonging to the leader of a “semi-serious” squad at Florida Poly and unload it while we were all sat around a table working out the infil plan. Well; trust heebie jeebies. There were half a dozen outright FLAT darts in there. Foam smashed to about 1/8" thick. I don’t even know how that happens unless you put a worn foam into the mag and THEN leave it for a year - new foam will not take that much of a set from a mag spring. He got 2 clips of new ammo and “The talk” about unloading mags nightly and all the usual stuff, but given how he played the game in general, he was mindblowingly nonchalant about learning that his mag had contained 6 near-certain deaths just below the few shots he fired in the last mission.

Anyway, where I am going with this is that unlike a mag (detachable or fixed) OR a revolver, a bulk hopper of darts would likely not lose reliability due to storage time, and if you chucked it in the closet until next season (uncocked), you might have 20 good, protected, darts in there when you pulled it out.

Brass tubing barrels always cause trouble when it comes to getting good feed ramps that don’t present a sharp edge to rounds anywhere. Perhaps using something thicker wall for the chamber (at least) would make more sense? .527 aluminum would be a ogod dart-agnostic one, but since this is presumably not a large springer, maybe it would benefit from a step down to .509 just in front of the chamber.