Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Still no bullpup?

Call this post a rant, if you want, but something that seems to bother me more and more these days, is the absence of bullpup style Nerf guns. Well, actually, there's no bullpup foam dart gun of ANY brand that comes to my mind, nor in the range of any other form of popular street tagger... I suppose I should explain what the term "bullpup" means for some who aren't familiar with it. Bullpup basically means that the magazine is behind the trigger, and therefore the loading mechanism and clip receiver are built in to the stock, meaning the overall length is much shorter, making for a more agile setup. (think: FAMAS from Call of Duty Black Ops or the type 88 sniper)

So what's the deal? Nerf's ever popular N-Strike range has been around for a fairly long time, and as part of that line there's slamfire "shotguns", revolvers, assault rifle style blasters, snipers, even fully automatic machine gun style blasters, but not one single blaster in the line is a bullpup blaster? surely the popularity of the FAMAS in a few popular FPS games would have sparked the urge to come up with an interesting design for a bullpup Nerf blaster amongst the design team at Nerf, right? Nope. In fact, the closest thing to a bullpup Nerf blaster is the Nerf Firefly, which isn't really bullpup anyway, It's just a mediocre revolver with the rotating turret placed above the trigger handle.



Of course, there is always going to be design challenges involved. the barrel would have to be of larger aperture and not excessively long, and of course the internals may need some redesigning to incorporate a large bore, short stroke piston to be able to generate enough force to fire the dart far enough. But seriously, if someone such as myself, a self-taught AutoCAD tinkerer can design piston valve potato cannons and high end BMX parts in mere spare time, I'm sure the design team could overcome such challenges easily to create a bullpup dart banger. I mean, seriously, you should see the bullpup pneumatic potato cannons people have managed to build over on the spudfiles forums...

...I hope you're listening Nerf!

2 comments:

  1. There is a bullpup nerf gun: The Rayven CS-18.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...There wasn't at the date of this post going up.

    ReplyDelete