I’ve been there.

Waterloo occasionally hosts invitationals which take place over a weekend, with a series of five or six missions back-to-back on the first day with more relaxed player-organized minigames on the day after. If you imagine a full week of HvZ compressed into one day, cutting out the between-classes play and leaving the most intense parts i.e. the missions, then this is pretty much that. Waterloo campus is a tightly integrated network buildings connected through tunnels and skyways. There’s always more than one way to get where you’re going, and there’s a lot more tight corners and shorter sightlines than on a typical campus. All of this adds up to make running away far more viable as a survival strategy for humans than on other campuses; the locals know this well and know the best escape routes. Personally, I prefer to fight but I’m OK with a running fight; I like to keep other humans alive by keeping zombie headbands down. I made this triple flywheeler integration primarily for that purpose and was lugging it around for most of the day. As an invitational attracts more serious and better-armed players, the moderators decided to compensate by implementing a short stun timer: five minutes, later reduced to four. For a full day of missions, this is pretty brutal.

The ultimate upshot of this is that both the humans and the zombies did a lot of running for the whole day. It was great, but by the end of it, I had a hard time going down stairs. (Surprisingly, it was going down stairs that was the most difficult. Climbing up stairs was easier.) I now have a better idea of what it is like for creaky old people, and I have Waterloo HvZ to thank for that.

There’s a few ways to do this. Which one is “best” for you depends on how technical you expect your audience to be.

The easiest way for you is probably to just tell your users that you use some or another library and that they need to have it installed.

The easiest way for your users is to copy/paste the parts of the library that you use into your code. The threads library you linked is CC0 so you can do that. This also futureproofs your design against changes that break this library and against this library becoming unavailable. (Normally copy/pasting from libraries is discouraged as this futureproofs designs against improvements in the library as well, but IMHO certain OpenSCAD libraries should be considered an exception to this rule. If a library renders the shapes that you want fast enough to make improvements irrelevant, there’s no need to keep the library external.)

This might be a bit of a non-answer, but my favorite thing about nerf is how different blasters can be different from each other while all being viable for use in most games. In a friendly nerf game in the park, you might see revolvers alongside lever-action rifles alongside dual-wielded derringers.

There’s a soft spot in my heart for Swarmfires and Rayvens, largely becasue those were among the best (for HvZ, for a “shoot lots and protect other humans” playstyle) blasters in production at the time when I started playing.

Others have suggested greasing the dowel or using bearings, and if the issue was friction, then they’d be right.

If the issue is inertia, then this won’t help. Accelerating a given mass to a given velocity requires a certain amount of energy, no matter what.

What could help is something similar to a Huygen drive, where the filament is looped around a large wheel (large enough that the filament can curve around it without breaking) which is able to move against a spring or counterweight. This would allow the movement of the spool to be “averaged out” rather than accelerating and decelerating sharply on every extrusion and retraction.

I have experience buying, not selling, but should still be able to help.

Local sales are the way to go for 3d printers. Local sales also allow people to see the printer and check that it works as they expect before committing to buying it. Most people will pay more for a known-working printer than a the-owner-says-it-works one. Local sales also avoid shipping which, in addition to the downsides that you’ve discovered, caries some risk for the printer. The downside of local sales is that you might have to wait for a long time until someone nearby wants the type of printer that you have (or until someone who doesn’t live nearby opportunistically picks up the printer as they were going to pass near you anyways).

Nealy everywhere has a Craigslist-like for local sales, which could be Kijiji, Letgo, FB marketplace, etc. There’s no harm in listing the same printers on multiple sites to see which one gathers the most interest. (Just please make sure to take all of the listings down once the printers are sold.)

Fellow OpenSCAD user here. I’d recommend it to anyone as a thing to try, but not necessarily as a thing to certainly end up using.

I love how much control it gives you over your designs and how you can use that to make intelligently parametric parts. I’m continuously frustrated by how it expects you to make (or find libraries for) everything from scratch. For example, I’ve recently discovered ClosePoints which is (a) brilliant and (b) makes me wonder why the heck this functionality isn’t built-in or at least in a default library. I’ve also found that using it for anything complicated has forced me to learn how to write better-organized code.

You still have to put in work to learn how to use it. It’s just a different kind of work.

Yes, it appears so. Of course, the final product could end up being different, but these are very promising promotional previews.

Good catch. That’s good news if true, not becasue Rival barrels would be useful (IMO they wouldn’t for most people), but because it means that Hasbro has plans to keep the Rival line around. Hasbro has cycled out ammo formats before, and people would miss Rival.

OK, wow. Hasbro’s aesthetic design team really knocked this one out of the park. This is far more than you’d expect for what’s functionally a pretty simple springer.

I remember. Flywheel tech was a huge thing for nerf when Hasbro figured out how to make good flywheel blasters. The Rapidstrike was a direct upgrade from the Stampede in nearly every way - more energy efficient, meaning a build could deliver the same power with smaller/lighter batteries, much less risk of runaway firing, and no worries about the geartrain breaking. The main thing that the Stampede had going for it was a very situational advantage: it worked as well with wet as with dry darts.

Before the Rapidstrike, Rayvens and Stryfes were very popular. (Barricades were good for their day, but compared to modern flywheelers . . . well, there’s a reason why we don’t see flywheel blasters with serrated flywheels or intended for use with whistler darts.) I remember hearing speculation that Hasbro was working on something “like the back of a Nitron and the front of a Stryfe” and that it was going to be good - and oh man, that speculation was just spot-on.

Now? Rapidstrikes are one of many good options and most people who would want one have several - but for a time, they were something quite special.

maybe I’ll do some mega for red.

Thanks, and that’s a good idea. I’ll remember it for next year.

I didn’t have as much mega then as I do now, but I did have a good number of Titans - which were too heavy for the tree to support.

It’s auto-posted videos by Linus that are being downvoted, and the “by Linus” seems the more relevant factor than “auto-posted.” I’ll admit that I’m a little bit out of the loop, I am aware that there’s several major controversies surrounding Linus right now. Videos critical of Linus are being upvoted, sometimes dramatically.

This situation has the smell of a bog-standard internet controversy. Linus’ reputation might or might not recover when people forget about the whole thing. His media group might or might not end up distancing itself from him before that happens.

If there’s any action that I’d recommend taking in response to all of this, it’d be re-evaluate whether you want to say “they’re awesome” in the sidebar. Right now you might be unintentionally giving the impression that you (and by extension the moderators and by extension the community) are on Linus’ side. I assume that you’d rather support a neutral discussion space (but I could be wrong).

Just checking - how confident are you that it’s the darts that are the issue? The Nexus Pro has a known manufacturing issue where the edges of the barrel at the breech end can be rough; sanding them smooth or running a blade around the inside of the barrel can fix that issue. Others have reported that the tightening rings are too tight and have had less jams once they sanded those slightly larger, although that’s harder to do without affecting the seal.

Magazine feeding is, in magfed blasters in general, also a common cause of jams: old mags, mags that were stored full, mags that are dirty inside . . . and, yes, also old darts with compressed foam (usually from being stored in a mag or front-loading blaster) are often to blame - though in the latter case it’s old/damaged darts that are the issue rather than darts that were shitty out of the box.

The Nexus Pro, like any sealed-breech blaster, will be happier with darts that have heads that are smaller (either slightly or much, but either way smaller) than the foam. Darts with heads the same size as the foam can work well in flywheelers, front-loaders, and traditional toy-style chamber-in-bolt blasters, so they’re fairly common.

So: if the problem is in fact the darts and if the conventional-for-a-good-reason solution of getting new darts of the right type isn’t the right solution for you, then old-school foam backer rod darts might be a good idea - but both of those are big "if"s.

I’ll second all of what Ali said, but I’d also like to add that not all games these days even allow homemade darts due to safety concerns. The worst-case here would be a felt tip falling off and exposing the metal washer underneath.

For this reason some darts were made without a washer at all - and with either a solid lump of hotglue serving as the weighted tip or with a small BB in the bottom of that hole for weight (which guide Ali linked might already say? There’s a follow-up post saying that it was updated to include metal-free dart tips but I can’t find where it describes how to make them.)

OP, I’d recommend reconsidering whether you want a hard tip. If you’re running into issues with people not feeling and not taking hits, improving the velocity of your blaster will solve that while also providing greater range a difficulty-to-dodge. (If your problem is people “not feeling” and not taking hits - then that’s not something that any modification can solve short of something actually dangerous.)

If you do have a good reason for wanting a harder-than-normal tip, then 3d printed tips are an option. TPU is available in a variety of hardnesses and differing infill and tip geometry should theoretically allow you to design a tip with whatever characteristics you want. I wouldn’t recommend this - most people don’t other with homemade darts at all any more and there’s good reasons for that - but it is an option if you just want homemade darts.

This would have been absolutely brilliant if it was released 3 years ago.

I haven’t even gotten to the best part: the Nerf Pro Stryfe X fits magazines and darts from other brands.

This is surprising given Hasbro’s past attempts to push proprietary ammo. I haven’t said this for a long time, but good for Hasbro.

$120 feels like a bit of money for a semiauto blaster when Dart Zone just began shipping the $90 select-fire Omnia Pro.

Indeed it does.

the Stryfe X’s new rails and lack of barrel adapter break compatibility with a decade of body kits

Wait, isn’t compatibility with existing kits the biggest benefit of keeping the form factor of the Stryfe? This doesn’t make sense.

As happy as I am to see Hasbro moving into the modern era, I’m concerned that this may be too little, to late, too expensive.

I’ve yet to see a printed mag adapter - but having the mag come in from any direction other than the top would require modifying at least part of the connection between the plunger tube and the pump grip, so if you’re doing that sort of work you may as well use another blaster’s magwell anyways.

The Sportsman is one of those blasters that I wish was more widely used. It’s not just the it has potential in certain specific roles - it’s unique, and impressive that it can work as well as it does.

Thanks!

Right now the blaster is in storage somewhere in a box in a loft after a move, so while there will be more pictures taken later, it won’t be soon (and I’m away from my usual computer, hence the delayed reply). There’s pictures in the linked blog posts showing the internals as well as the outside at different stages in the blaster’s development.

One improvement that I’m planning on making is putting a latch on the top of the blaster for opening and closing the shell. One of the stock screws is currently used for the purpose of stopping the top of the shell from splitting open and repeatedly inserting/removing it (as that’s how the batteries are accessed) has worn out the hole in the screw boss. There’s a way to fix that - devcon in the hole, drill it out - but doing that repeatedly is a bit of a bother.

The plan is to use the carry handle from a Modulus to create some extra space at the top of the blaster so that a latch or larger screw for the main shell can be hidden inside of the handle. When I do that, probably in a couple months, I’ll post pictures here.

Jank is customized. Jank requires at least some effort. Jank says “I made this, so of course I know how to use it.” Jank means that someone knows what they need, and knows that jank is enough.

Very nice!

It’s amazing what clever people can make out of whatever’s handy. The best tactical gear is often the gear that you make for yourself as you can fully customize it. HvZ players have made great holsters out of duck tape and literal garbage, for example.

A spring swap alone should increase FPS. Walcom managed to get over 300 fps with an unspecified spring and a stock barrel with the extension modified to accept a SCAR - so, technically not a completely stock barrel, but something close to it for the purpose of velocity.

This was a no-parts-needed modification, so you might still want to do this minor barrel mod even though it’s not necessary for a quick velocity boost.