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Post by trinity on Aug 20, 2012 16:26:05 GMT -5
If you haven't read my Blog then you might have missed one of the potentially biggest developments to happen in the first-strike world since they first came out. This isn't about just a new mag but a manufacturer who is saying they will be actually be selling its own version of first strike rounds. Scarab Arms is a new player and is introducing a new mil-sim rifle and what it refers to as "fin-stabilized rounds." Scarab Arms, like Tiberius Arms, also supplies products to law enforcement. I have a longer piece on my Blog site but if you're interested you can see its materials for yourself by looking at www.scarabarms.com. You can get a bit more by going to Scarab's Facebook page. The site says that the products will become available in October. There is some unsubstantiated speculation that the people making this product are either current or ex-partners in Mil-Sig. Is it real? It's too early to tell. The multitude of typos in its stuff doesn't give me a good feeling. In addition, I tried to contact them this morning and Scarab doesn't give you an email address. Instead, they have a contact form that is very restrictive in its format. You would think that a brand-new company that is seeking to get in an play with all the other more-established companies would be after every bit of attention they can garner, not hiding behind some silly contact form. If they are real and if its new gun and Scarab rounds actually come into existence then Tiberius has something to worry about. |
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Post by casper on Aug 20, 2012 19:29:01 GMT -5
Haahaaa your link goes to some egyption stuff is it spam  |
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Post by trinity on Aug 20, 2012 20:16:34 GMT -5
Sorry about that. I left part of the address out of the site address. The address is fixed in the original. It should have been. www.scarabarms.com |
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Post by chicago on Aug 21, 2012 9:39:59 GMT -5
Great new blog Trinity. Those cutaways are awesome. The photos graphically illustrate the quality and thought that went into the SR1. Bill is a genius. Now fix the barrel interface.
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Post by joshsmithers on Aug 22, 2012 3:03:59 GMT -5
Trinity, I've been reading your blog since almost as long as it's been up. I was glad to see you brought it back and the new posts. Thanks for everything you do! As with Scarab Arms, I can only hope. Hopefully, your assumptions are correct and they are manufacturing their own FS (which I guess would now stand for Fin Stabilized) rounds. We would all love to see this become a reality, for it would help decrease the cost of first strikes. However, it may just be a trademark concern for them as you mentioned. According to their twitter account they will be at operation end war. If someone here goes, can you please detain and interrogate one of their representatives? |
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Post by trinity on Aug 22, 2012 3:47:46 GMT -5
Thanks for your kind words. The truth is that I thought I wouldn't miss the game and the stalks near as much as I did. I just can't seem to hang up the old boom mic and sell my gear. It's ironic that when I started writing the Blog there really wasn't all that much happening in the world of first strikes. Now things seem to be exploding.
Speaking of exploding, according to Scarab Arms's Facebook site it is definitely going to be selling its own version of the first strike round (Scarab Round). Scarab will only say the rounds won't be expensive, whatever that means.
There are a lot of people bashing the gun (just another blowback, etc.) even though no one has yet even handled it, but I really wish them well. The more competition the better. There are a few embarrassing typos in their materials. (buttock instead of buttstock for example), and their contact form is needlessly restrictive in my opinion, but it looks like a new start-up and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Glad you enjoy the Blog. Chicago will read this and be jealous that my Blog has a fan, then his mind will wander off into the fog of his delusions about naked posse members and Hooters restaurants that he has visited in his fantasies.
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Post by chicago on Aug 22, 2012 10:31:55 GMT -5
Hey Trinity, I'm jealous...but, I forgot what I was going to say...something about a fan. Oh, maybe that was it. Today, my naked ninja cheerleaders are replacing a ceiling fan in my room. I'm trying to decide whether I should go to Hooters or just stay home and help them climb the ladder.
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Post by avengingangel on Aug 23, 2012 9:02:26 GMT -5
hey Chicago, did you hear about the new ATW from Tippman. the All Terrain Walker. Tippman is looking for beta testers! But, figured this would be more your style:  Take me for a ride in it! |
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Post by jjron99 on Aug 23, 2012 18:29:00 GMT -5
I totally agree with trinity. The more competition, the better for us consumers. I'm a big fan of first strike rounds but what always bugs me is that Tiberius is the only manufacturer ie, a complete monopoly and therefore is able to charge whatever price they choose. So I wish Scarab Arms the best and I hope they can produce quality product at reasonable prices. trinity - I'm a big fan of your blog too. I will testify that your blog does help people become better precision paintball players. |
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Post by trinity on Aug 24, 2012 2:57:09 GMT -5
Glad you like the stuff on the Blog. I am all about the slow, methodical stalk and a precision kill.
I really, really hope Scarab Arms makes a go of it. Like you, I think Tiberius Arms has a pretty good profit margin on first strikes. I don't begrudge them that. They had the foresight to bring the rounds to paintball and for that they are making a healthy profit. That's one aspect of capitalism. Another aspect is competition. I really believe that if Scarab gets into this we could see some steadily falling prices for first strikes. Imagine how many more players would be using these rounds if the price for them was cut in half. More players using first strikes translates to more manufacturers making and selling more first-strike guns.
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Post by joshsmithers on Sept 10, 2012 7:53:30 GMT -5
Well they just put out a video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v3miRYkBBM I haven't gotten a chance to see it with audio yet cause I'm at work. Hard to tell much from just the video. I'm interest to see it's theory of operation and what kind of round he was using. The three shot velocity "test" wasn't too promising. |
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Post by casper on Sept 10, 2012 8:51:10 GMT -5
What do you guys want from the operation end war ??It's at a local field actually 15 min from my house.Want me to get some vids ??I will be going out to check it out.
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Post by chicago on Sept 10, 2012 10:59:16 GMT -5
@joshsmithers. I was not impressed at all with the readings from the chronograph. over 30 fps jumps! At least they were honest about it. And, I'll wait to see more reviews and chrono readings before passing judgment; but, like I said 30 fps is a lot!
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Post by trinity on Sept 10, 2012 14:47:18 GMT -5
I have to say that I found this video quite disappointing. I do understand that Scarab has clearly identified this rifle as a "prototype." I also understand that the gun itself is being marketed more as an assault-rifle platform rather than purely as a sniper weapon. Having said that though there are still two rather disturbing aspects to all this.
The first (and probably least important at this stage) are obviously the velocity swings themselves. Even starting from a place that this is an assault rifle, velocity swings that large cause problems when you take a gun that has them to a commerical paintball field.
Using a very consistent paintball gun means that you can preset your gun chrono to be just under whatever your field's legal chrono limit without worrying that you are going to be spending all kinds of time tinkering with the velocity screw at the chrono station. If you have ever watched players using cheaper mechanical guns (without good internal regs) you know what I mean. They alternate between shooting over the chrono and reducing the gun's velocity until they finally get the required number of shoots under the legal chrono limit. In large part, the reduction in velocity has to be done to deal with the guns internal velocity swings. Ultimately, they do get the guns velocity reduced down far enough to get on the field and most of them are using round paintballs and precision accuracy is not one of their key concerns.
The Scarab isn't cheap and it shouldn't self-describe itself as being of those types of guns. Do Scarab mean to suggest that you should be setting a Scarab's velocity at 250 FPS to make sure you can get onto a field with a 280 FPS velocity limit? Now, it is important to remember this is still a prototype so hopefully the velocity issues have been identified and are being dealt with, but that brings me to the second (and much larger issue).
While the velocity swings are problematic, the thing that concerns me more than the mechanical issues are the knowledge behind the gun. What I mean is this. The video seems to be pretty well produced. Obviously, it is by Scarab and is intended to show off the gun in the best light possible. Fair enough. They are entitled to do that as long as don't misrepresent anything. With that being Scarab's goal, why in the world would it have included those portions of the video with the velocity swings. That isn't something they should be bragging about or showing off (as they do in all the other sequences); that is something you fix. It would be akin to showing the shooter in that video firing at the target and missing it with every round he fired. Why would a company choose to hightlight something like that? The short answer is, they wouldn't. They would immediately recognize that they had accuracy issues to fix and stick with just highlighting the gun itelf while staying away from scenes showing the operational readiness of the weapon. At least until the accuracy issues were resolved.
What this video suggests to me is a company that doesn't really understand that there is anything wrong with a 30 FPS velocity swing. All of us on this forum know how hard we work to reduce those swings. True to form, the very first comments from the people here went right to that concern.
So my question is this? How could the people at Scarab not know that? What does that mean for the build on the rest of this gun? After all, Scarab goes out of its way to claim on its website that they have some of the most experienced milsim operators in the the industry today (their words not mine). If true, that would be a really good thing. My question, however, is this. Of all those highly experience milsim "operators" (I just love that word) and other people working behind the scenes on the development of this gun, no one who watched this video saw those swings as a problem? Really? No one said, "Hey guys, we got a velocity problem here that we need to look at and maybe we should just leave that part of the video out until we get that issue taken care of." No one?
Of course until the gun actually finds its way into some user's hands, we won't know if Scarab intends to just leave it the way it is or do further work on the issue. It really is too soon to reach a final decision on the rifle. This video, however, does not bode well.
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Post by joshsmithers on Sept 10, 2012 16:06:24 GMT -5
Well I just saw the video for the first time with audio. I didn't even notice the first two shots over the chrono when I saw it before! The differential between 300 and 271 is just too much. This has me thinking that the gun either has a really crappy regulator or simply uses a "tippmann-style, set screw in the power tube" to control air flow. But I have to play the devil's advocate here. The shots were as follows: 271 300 270 275 283 After all, it was only 5 shots. If you remove that one 300 FPS shot from the data, the variance goes to only +-13 FPS. Not bad. That one rogue paintball could have simply been a few thousandths bigger or smaller than the other four. Or perhaps the chrono misread the shot somehow. With only five shots, there is simply no way to accurately determine the consistency of this new marker. In the video you can see that he continues to shoot after the 283 shot, so I wonder why that part is cut out. At this point in time, I'm not too concerned with the marker itself. I'm more interested to see if a new "fin-stabilized round" will be produced.  |
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Post by trinity on Sept 10, 2012 17:51:38 GMT -5
Well I just saw the video for the first time with audio. I didn't even notice the first two shots over the chrono when I saw it before! The differential between 300 and 271 is just too much. This has me thinking that the gun either has a really crappy regulator or simply uses a "tippmann-style, set screw in the power tube" to control air flow. But I have to play the devil's advocate here. The shots were as follows: 271 300 270 275 283 After all, it was only 5 shots. If you remove that one 300 FPS shot from the data, the variance goes to only +-13 FPS. Not bad. That one rogue paintball could have simply been a few thousandths bigger or smaller than the other four. Or perhaps the chrono misread the shot somehow. With only five shots, there is simply no way to accurately determine the consistency of this new marker. In the video you can see that he continues to shoot after the 283 shot, so I wonder why that part is cut out. At this point in time, I'm not too concerned with the marker itself. I'm more interested to see if a new "fin-stabilized round" will be produced. Why not just remove the 285 FPS reading too? Then we have only +/- 4 FPS. Now this rifle is in the same category as my Tiberius T9.1. But why stop there? Let's remove the 275 FPS as well. Now we are down to +/- 1 FPS and it's even more consistent than my SR1. Choosing to eliminate a large velocity swing because it might have been attributable to inconsistent paint size and then (once you have eliminated the swing) drawing a conclusion that the gun's velocity is "not bad" is an exercise in pure speculation and less than an objective way to view that piece of video. An advocate for the gun might use that argument to defend its performance. An impartial observer would not. The numbers are what the numbers are. It's kind of like golf. You play the shot from where you find it. This wasn't my video or yours. It was a Scarab Arms video. Do you believe that this rifle has only been fired five times over the chrono during its devlopment? Neither do I, but it was these particular five chrono readings that they spent time and energy to give to us. This wasn't a review; it was advertising. Had someone watching the numbers on the chrono seen the velocity swing they easily could have chosen to shoot another five-shot sequence with a lesser velocity spread and then used that in the video. I think that would have been fair as long as the numbers they did show us were accurate and not contrived. I say that because when all is said and done, Scarab's video is just advertising. Scarab didn't do that. I have to presume that Scarab Arms intentionally left all the scenes in this current video because they wanted us to see them, be impressed with them, and use them to draw our conclusions about the quality of the rifle. That is what advertising is all about. This velocity swing could have many causes. It could be because of an oddball size paintball round, a poor regulator, or the complete lack of one. It could be the result of a combination of all the above causes. I won't speculate about the why of the swing, but neither will I pretend that it did not happen. The real problem with speculation is that once you start it is hard to know where to stop. Let me engage in some of my own. Maybe, just maybe, they fired many, many five-shot sequences and this one was the most consistent string they had. Maybe, just maybe, after the gun read 283 FPS they got a 310 FPS. After all, a manufacturer usually includes the best possible respresentation of his product in its advertising. Couldn't we credibily speculate that there were lots and lots of other tests that weren't as consistent as this one and they just ended up showing us the best one they had? Is that plausible? In the end, it's easier (and fairer) to just accept what your eyes see on the screen and go from there. As I said in my post, this video shouldn't lead anyone to the firm conclusion that the gun is junk. What this video does do is raise some doubts in my mind about the build of the gun. Maybe those doubts will be resolved when we see the user reviews but believe me, this video would cause me to look very closely at those reviews before I purchased one. You say that there is no way to accurately determine the consistency of this rifle with just five chrono readings. That's a correct statement, but I also think it is fair to say that because only Scarab has all the facts, at least up to this point, about the consistency of this gun, that makes Scarab the best source of information about the gun's potential. While a potential buyer might not be able to categorically know about the consistency of the rifle based on that video, they have, in my opinion, been put on notice that it may have consistency issues that should be evaluated prior to purchasing. I, too, care most about the promise of getting first strike rounds from a different source and the encouragement of competition in that arena. On the other hand, I am also looking for a dependable, accurate, well-built assault rifle to replace my T9.1 if that becomes possible. There are missions that just simply require having a gun that shoots first stirkes, is mag-fed, and has an semi-automatic rate of fire. I am not wedded to Tiberius. What I won't do, however, is spend the premium dollar to get something that doesn't perform any better than what I have. |
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Post by chicago on Sept 10, 2012 18:36:21 GMT -5
I agree with Trinity. The only thing I could give them is that "many regulators" need a chance to "break in" may be when the reg is more seasoned it would not have such a wild swing. But, like I said earlier, to their credit, they actually published what the numbers were. May be we didn't see the really bad swings (did you ever think of that?) And, honestly, those numbers were not great! I'm willing to reserve judgement until more tests are done. I'm sure that trinity or myself would be happy to do some "independent testing" for them.
Oh, there is an approach which throws out the high and the low reading and then averages the rest. The problem is that if you play at your local field and you get a 300 fps on just one shot, they are going to make you crank it down!
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Post by joshsmithers on Sept 10, 2012 19:11:10 GMT -5
I agree with you completely, Trinity. The one hot shot shouldn't be so easily dismissed. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so quick to judge. Yes, the video was less informational than it was advertising but as you said before, this is only a prototype. Time will only tell.
I am not interested in this marker at all, however. From what I've seen, this is not worth the $700. I'll stick with my t9.1.
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Post by trinity on Sept 10, 2012 19:20:58 GMT -5
Until we get some further information, I think you're decision to stick with the T9.1 is a good one. I love the idea of competition in the first strike area, but for that competition to do its job the products have to be improved versions of what is already out there. That drives other manufacturers to improve what they are already selling. My worry is that if Scarab Arms doesn't survive because it's products can't compete, them it will cease to exist as a seller of first strike rounds. For me, that would be the real tragedy.
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Post by archorn on Oct 22, 2012 19:07:08 GMT -5
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