Comment on Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for a waterballs?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 week ago
As others have stated, this is indeed already something that exists.
I’m here to go on record to point out something that most people seem not to know about paintballs, which is that their “mess” is intentionally made of materials that are washable and readily water soluble, for obvious reasons. I’ve seen a lot of hyperventilating coming from certain individuals over the years about youths supposedly being able to permanently vandalize things at a distance with paintball guns and therefore they should all be banned. This is fiction. Rest assured that anything paintballs will do to your stuff can be cured by simply rinsing it down with your garden hose.
(This is obviously notwithstanding suitably motivated individuals from rolling their own ammo out of whatever-the-hell. A paintball gun will dutifully send downrange anything round and roughly .68" in diameter, with varying degrees of success depending on the density and/or fragility of the object in question.)
Thanks for the heads up! I’ve not played paintball so I didn’t know what kinda paint the standard stuff was using, and was mostly thinking about a way to minimize any clean up involved.
Kinda contrary to some of the fun of the game, but everyone likes to play differently.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Not only are they water soluble and easily washed out… the vast majority of them are also non toxic.
If you get paint on your mask, and it splatters through to your mouth… non toxic. Tastes terrible, but its not gonna harm you via ingestion. Much of the ‘paint’ is … basically just food dye.
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… Also… a whole lot of police… just use paint markers (they are technically, legallt classed as ‘markers’ because they aren’t firearms thus are not ‘guns’)… they use markers with pepper balls.
They just shoot miniature tear gas / skin irritant /eye irritant ‘paintballs’ as a less lethal weapon.
You can put a whole lot of different liquids inside what is basically a semi rigid gel/plastic capsule.
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The old devious trick I remember was people would freeze their paintballs the night before a match.
Nowadays, I’m fairly sure if you are caught doing that, you don’t just get banned from that field/course… you probably get prosecuted.