How accurate is the flatline?

954Yoda said:

Shows how much you know. The 98 has about 4 more inches after it straightens out there fire making it not only different from the a5 and a7 as they are much shorter it also makes it much more accurate. So I’ll take that sarcastic award and wear it cuz it shows how uneducated you are and also your ignorance

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Oiee.

Ok, strap in and take notes, you might learn something

First off, I've been in paintball for around 18 years at this point and been an airsmith for over half of that. I've owned and worked on more tippmanns then you have probably seen. I've owned every tippmann except for the c3 (go look it up, made in the day when tippmann was a respectable brand)

Barrel length in paintball, has nothing to do with accuracy past about the first 6 inches. Realistically, an 8-10" barrel is all you really need to have the best accuracy and efficiency. The extra length barrels have is to allow for porting which significantly quiets down the shot. Ever wondered why there are millions of 12-16" barrels out there and then much fewer 18"+? Anything 18"+ is just a marketing gimmick aimed at new players

The internal barrel on the Flatlines is the same, that extra 4 inches is not actually doing anything. See the photo below. That curved section is the barrel, the rest is just shroud (in case you have never taken yours apart)




All the Flatlines and backspin barrels for that matter have bad accuracy. The backspin makes it so. In a perfect theoretical world they would have really good accuracy, maybe better than smooth bore barrels but in reality here is what happens. Each ball gets spin put on it but not all are spinning on the same exact axis. When a ball comes out leaning slightly left or right that puts the smallest about of side spin on the ball. Over the whole flight of the ball that slight side spin pulls the ball left or right. This is why the flatline shots seem to "wander" sometimes, also why you get an odd corkscrew shot every once in a while, that corkscrew shot is a ball that got a very out of line spin on it. Basically what I'm talking about to the extreme

Range: flatline and backspin barrels don't give you any additional EFFECTIVE range. At the point where the paint from a smoothbore barrel hits the ground, the flatline paint can not break on anything. Yes it's still in the air but in a game where the point is to get a break on another player, bouncing paint off of them does nothing. This is again, marketing. Tippmann tells you that the paint will go further, and that's true, they just neglect to mention it won't break. Range in paintball is a result of exit velocity and drag, if you are shooting round ball you have the same exit velocity and drag, doesn't matter if it's spinning or not.

Do yourself a favor, go read Tom Kayes tech tips, here's the link, tips 1 and 3 are related to what I'm talking about here


If you don't know who Tom kaye was, he basically is the Albert Einstein of paintball. He had innovations in the late 80s that is taken the industry almost 30 years to figure out he was on to something. He tried spinning paintballs (corkscrew spin, not backspin) in the early 90s, found the results not very good. Tip 1 talks about barrel length


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