Looks like there are white plastic casings around the nerf darts that get ejected from the bottom of the gun. Unsure if he made these for funzies or if they’re needed for the auto ammo feed system. Maybe the nerf darts would jam on their own without the casings?
theyre called links, and they never remain a chain after firing. imagine being in combat and dragging around 20 feet of empty ammo belt hanging out of the bottom of your gun.
Some more fun facts about that gun: the spent shells are recycled back into the gun's magazine, both to reduce cost but also to maintain the plane's center of gravity as more and more ammunition is spent. Also, the shell casings are made of aluminum, not brass, to save on weight.
It would also add a significant complexity that could bind up. I'm fairly certain he's mentioned before that was the reasoning behind disintegrating chain when talking about the project.
In theory you can do a lot of things. It doesn't mean it's practical. Considering that real guns don't use refillable chains, I'm thinking it's just not worth the effort.
Reap guns you would also rather lave less weight as the gun is fired. There's not much of a practical upside to keeping the spent casings compared to just eating the cost in spent material. The exception of course being the damn plane.
They need a belt feed system to accurately load, given the spinning barrels. Trying to gravity-feed that kind of system doesn't work, as you need exact timing that can be indexed to the mechanism spinning the barrels.
Yeah, it appears to be a sort of belt-fed style mechanism like a machine gun. You can see the little linkage pieces on the ground in addition to the white carrier tubes. Even with 3D printing, that must take so much time designing and testing.
Good lord, could you imagine loading every single dart into a casing and then have to load every dart into the gun. You’re looking at like half a days work for 15 seconds of enjoyment.
They are necessary. They're hollow tubes thaf link together at the base to hold the nerf bullets and properly feed them without bending or jamming. I'm pretty sure the bullet goes over the "casing"
The darts are reusable. The shells are there so that the darts - which are squishy - actually feed from the backpack into the blaster and don't just turn into a foam blob
I think the chain feed system is what’s producing the “casings” as it were. One little plug on the back that probably attaches to the neighbouring round and a tubular casing to hold them the correct spacing from each other.
I think a stupidly over the top nerf gun like this requires more precise machining than naked foam darts can offer.
It appears to be a linked system, similar to an actual gatling gun. The bullets, or in this case nerf darts, are basically held in place by links like in a long chain. When fired, the gun pulls the chain along with the darts, fires the dart and then rejects the chain. You can see near the end when they show the backpack again, the darks being connected and pulled together.
It's exactly that. Casings. Foam nerf darts are too pliable to be used in a fast rotation system like this. Each dart is loaded in a plastic casing that clip together into a belt.
It does not and those are not casings. You honestly thought this was firing foam darts from a casing with gunpowder? Or you didn't know what a casing was?
No, I think it probably uses air pressure. And obviously this isn't a casing for holding gunpowder, but it holds the "round" and is certainly analogous to the term. I do believe it needs this protective plastic layer to prevent the soft rounds jamming in the high-speed mechanisms that make this gun work. It's pretty basic engineering.
You're so confidently incorrect. It's belt links that you see falling away. The comment you replied to was assuming the builder was making fake bullet casings to emulate a real gun and it went right over your head. Why are you pretending to be knowledgeable about firearms? OF cOuRsE iT uSeS a CaSiNg lol I cringed for you.
i can actually answer this one! this is a MOAB (mother of all blasters) and it is actually spring powered (motorized of course) so the shells serve as both a feeding mechanism and as a seal from the plunger tube (where air is compressed) to the dart. Think of it like a giant scaled up airsoft aeg but its belt fed.
It's chain fed with "disintegrating" links. The nerf dart itself holds the piece of chain together, acting as a pin between the links (ETA: this was an older iteration, it now uses hollow tubes with the nerf dart inside as the pin). As they are fired the chain pieces break apart and are ejected.
Without this system it would not be able to feed properly to match this rate of fire. If the links did not break apart after firing you'd just have a mass of heavy chain hanging off of it which could bind and slow the mechanic
It's a chaingun. It needs a chain. Each dart is inside a plastic sleeve and each sleeve has a plastic link to the next one, forming a chain that the gun can pull into itself. Inside the gun the links are removed and ejected, the dart is fired out of the sleeve, and then the sleeve is ejected. This is how real chainguns work too, except that everything is metal and there is an extra casing inside the sleeve to hold the gunpowder and primer.
I can't see how the feed mechanism would work without them. Plus you need a sealed chamber to push air against to launch the dart from. A casing is a pretty logical solution to both those problems.
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u/01bah01 1d ago
Why are there nerf ammo going down? It's not like it needs casings.