Paintball

Wow, just came across this amazing clip of the Mythbusters making some art with paintballs.


Remarkable.

This last Saturday, I went paintballing at TNT Paintball with my church. We brought a group of 18 people, and another group of 10 people fought alongside. When we arrived to the paintball field, we saw a lot of pro paintballers who brought a lot of their own equipment. We're talking about modified guns with improved accuracy and range, body armour, elaborate air systems, etc. When the teams were divided, our side had two people with their own guns, while the other team had at least five. This was going to be a battle of the pros vs joes. Looks like we were going to be outgunned, but I love being the underdog. Naturally, a few people were a bit intimidated by our competition, but that quickly got disspelled when you show that the enemy is not invincible.

By the way, if you were there paintballing, please leave comments on this blog entry.

On the first game, we played on the urban assault field, and we got slaughtered simply because we didn't know the field. We had a rematch on the field, and we won.

Bunker To Bunker

The next field we played on was the Grog's Nest which consists of forts linked by bridges, and 60 man-made bunkers. I thought I was going to hate this field because it reminded me of speedball courses with the man-made bunkers, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The objective was to take a flag from the center fort, and deliver it to the enemy base.

The strategy we had was to grab as much real estate as possible in the first minute of the battle, in order to capture strategic locations. Doug ran to center immediately, grabbed the flag, and hid the flag behind me. I ran up the left flank of the map. My objective was to be the tip of the spear which leads the assault. I had to pave the way clear for our flag runner, so he could safely deliver the flag to the enemy base. I picked off 8 people who were unfortunate enough to get in my way. Eventually, I was eliminated, but Adam, our trusty flag runner was able to make it to the other end with barely any resistence. Adam made a great flag runner because he was able to hang back and survive through entire games. Doug and I were usually the shock forces who aggressively rushed against the enemy. Lucas also was a trusty last line of defence. He was able to survive long enough to launch a late game offensive. He was our rock. Anyway, on this field, both sides were able to pick up a point, so we were still tied.

Well, yesterday I was out paintballing with my youth group at Stormin Norman's. Before the day started, I was having a few second thoughts like.... man, its been a few years since I've last played, what if I'm not as good anymore. There was also a noobie that everyone was wanting to hunt down to settle some scores, and I thought, it would be really embarassing to get shot down by this person.

When we got to the paintball field, we surveyed our potential competition. We had a group of 10, and there was another party consisting mostly of kids and a few parents. There was also one pro paintballer who had his own gear and uniform. We got out to the field, and it was going to be a 10 vs 10 battle for the afternoon. The teams were divided and from my church group, we had myself, Pastor Doug Slack, and my brother. We also got the pro paintballer, one parent, and the rest kids. The other team had seven people from the church group, and the rest kids plus a parent. Originally, I thought the teams were going to be unbalanced because the other team had more able bodied men and women; this didn't prove to be a problem.

The scenario of the day was attack and defend. The attacker's objective is to attack the defender's base, and take down the base flag. The defender's objective is to prevent the attackers from obtaining the flag for 10 or 15 minutes.

Game 1

My team started as the defender. Our strategy was to send three people outside of the base to harass the enemy and buy everyone some time. Everyone else was tasked to defend the base. When the game started, I dashed out of the right side of the base. I stealthily got behind enemy lines, and started my attack run up a hill and took out four attackers. They never saw it coming because I was shooting them from behind. By midgame, I took out another two attackers on a hill, but then another three attackers showed up. I take another one out, but the ref tells us to stop firing. Apparently I was shooting at my own team mates. I thought this was an enemy because he was facing our base like an attacker.

This friendly fire confusion happened because by the time I took out the two attackers on the hill, they were the last of the attacking force. The rest of the defenders rushed up the hill that I was shooting at. We were shooting each other because there were no enemies left, and the referees didn't realize this, and they hadn't stopped the game. The referees are supposed to end the game when one side runs out of players. We completely dominated that game.

Play of the Day

The play of the day comes from Game 4 where Doug and I were attacking the enemy base. This is the play of the day not because of how many kills we got, but it's the strategy that was in play.

At the beginning of the game, we cleared the right side of the enemy base, and we were going to the center of the field to prepare to capture their flag.



As we went to the center of the field, I noticed that all of our attackers to the left had been eliminated, and the defenders were rushing up from the left hand side. If we didn't take them out, we would have been encircled and they'd have clear shots at us from behind. So, I rushed to the left side to hold off the enemy while Doug took on the base defenders. I managed to eliminate two defenders immediately, because they weren't expecting me. I moved further down to the left, I found another two defenders huddled behind a bunker. I couldn't pick them off, but I was keeping them pinned down, and they couldn't move against Doug.

Meanwhile, Doug entered the enemy base and neutralized the guards in the tower fort, and blew away all of the defenders, and bagged the flag for the win. The crazy thing is, the tower guys didn't even warn their teammates that someone had entered the base, and that's how Doug managed to get the element of surprise.

Anyway, the strategy was great because two of us were able to handle eight defenders. That is some serious force multipliers there.

This weekend marks my epic return to the paintball fields; I haven't been paintballing in over two years now. Unfortunately, most of my crew is either in Vancouver or is unavailable, but we'll have to do. I'm going with my church youth group to Stormin Norman's.

To prepare, I've been building endurance by running 2.8km twice a week since the middle of April. The best time so far has been 13:50 which is still about 40 seconds slower than my running times back in high school. But hey, high school was a very long time ago, and I'm getting old.

The other thing I've been doing is reviewing battle tactics, and I've come across an excellent introduction to paintball tactics. It's entitled, the "Paintball Tactics Guide". The guide uses Flash to demonstrate its key concepts, and it's very entertaining to go through, and it covers all the basics that you need to know. The guide starts with individual level tactics, then squad level, then team level. It's very well done!

For the more hardcore tactician, you can scan through the U.S. Army's Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad Training Manual. Some really good stuff in there, but it's a long read. I've been told most military tactics will work in the paintball field. Err.... minus the parts about putting up defensive barbwire, calling in airstrikes, and positioning heavy armour units for frontal strikes.

I'll warn you ahead of time that this article probably makes me look like an irrational psychopath and it probably shatters what little journalistic credibility I have accumulated, but I'm not crazy .... seriously.... (twitch). So, this article is supposed to appease a segment of my audience that considers themselves burly men with full coats of chest hair.

Anyways I was going through my weekly blogs and news sources, and I came across this baby called the Razorback:



The article can be found here. It's a paintball tank vehicle that is built using an Israeli-made fast attack vehicle. The thing comes fully loaded with a turret with duel paintball guns, and a regulation rocket launcher?!! The turret can swivel 360 degrees, and can fire at a rate of 30 rounds per second. The vehicle can also carry up to 19,000 paintballs onto the field. It looks like this thing can hold 3 people: a driver, a side gunner, and a turret gunner. Apparently this thing even features a built-in sound system for psychological warfare. Nothing like aggravating the enemy with tunes from the Backstreet Boys.

I'm curious to know how they incorporate vehicles safely into a paintball game. It'd be pretty bad if someone got hit by one of these vehicles. Apparently the way to take out one of these vehicles in competition is to fire an anti-tank weapon at the tank. It has to hit an area of the vehicle called the kill zone. The anti-tank weapon of choice for foot soldiers is a LAW rocket launcher which apparently fires a NERF missile at the tank.

Psst, Norm, it's time to buy one of these. One of these will set you back $42,000 USD. If anyone wants to give me an early birthday present that counts for all future birthdays .... you know what to do. Did I mention I've been a good boy this year as well?

I wonder if this thing is street legal.... grunt grunt grunt. It would be pretty good for crowd control purposes I would imagine.

Intro

Last month I went on an end of summer paintball excursion at TNT Paintball. This was my first time at TNT Paintball. A bunch of people said they were going to come, but it ended up being just me and Tyler. In either case, it was still a lot of fun. Lucky us, we went on the day that rained the most that summer.

The morning was great because it was cloudy and cool which is ideal; however, it started coming down pretty hard in the afternoon. My googles were fogging up quite a bit, and the rain started affecting the gun's accuracy. We played 10 games I think, and I ended up using about 400 rounds of paint which is typical for me. My battle wounds are fairly superficial compared to other battles I've had. I could still walk properly the next day, so that's a good sign.

We worked pretty darn well as a team. Tyler's my trusty tail gunner. Usually I run up front and draw fire, while Tyler responds in kind to enemies. If an enemy is bunkered down real well, usually Tyler will give suppression fire while I sneak around for the kill. It worked really well.

Play of the Day

In either case, a bunch of my friends asked how paintballing went, so instead of retelling the story a billion times over e-mail, I made a Flash movie that tells our tales of valour and glory.

This movie clip highlights the play of the day that Tyler and I had. The mission was to deliver a backpack bomb to the enemy base. So, Tyler and I being a special ops unit was given the task to neutralize the enemy base's defences. (For those who can't play Flash movies, I'll summarize it by this: Tyler and I managed to sneak into the enemy base and took out 6 of their defenders.)

Use the buttons in the lower right corner to control movie.