Nerf FNG

Tight barrels vs. Loose barrels. While certain tests can have results favored in either one, here's the facts behind these.

A tight barrel will lead to tight shot grouping and greater range ONLY IF barrel pressure is constantly maintained high and the projectile is a tight fit on the barrel.

A loose barrel, commonly seen in nerf guns, has wide shot grouping, is ineffecient in terms of propulsion of projectiles(i will look further into loose barrels)

Nerf Guns are loose barreled because they cannot(Even without air restrictor, or with your semilethal homemade) have a velocity high enough to get darts to effeciently fly past the tight barrel(see my topic on rifling). Military guns (such as the AR-15/M-16, whose springs are exploited by the hardcore nerf gunsmith) on the other hand, are TIGHT barreled because the bullets they fire can effectively use the advantages of a tight barrel, even with the intense friction inside the barrel when firing.

As always, i will conduct more research on this matter in my free time.

As it has resurfaced in my attention that rifling is a hotly debated topic, here's why rifling is added in Nerf Guns:

Rifling in nerf guns is NOT intended to impart a spin on the projectile, as the projectile itself is (mostly) stable. This rifling is instead intended to prevent the bullet from bouncing around in the barrel as would be the case in a smoothbore barrel. But performance between the two was mixed

To see for myself, i have acquired two stock Elite Retaliators...

I needed a smoothbore jacket for one, but materials such as brass and PVC are much harder than the barrel of the gun itself, which would create an extra variable or two. I settled on a 2-layer copier paper jacket semipermanently adhered to the barrel, which was close enoguh to the barrel to simulate it's hardness, but far away enough so that the rifling was absent in the new barrel. The light weight of the new barrel ensured no shots would be falsified by an extra variable.

I set up a 7"x7" cardboard target painted in red 25 feet away in a hallway.

I loaded 12 elite darts into the magazine of each rifle and fired all at the target which was exactly at my height.

9 of the rifle barrel darts hit the target, leading to a 75% accuracy total. The darts flew in a fairly straight fashion away from the barrel,with a spread of about 20° from the barrel.

4 of the smoothbore barrel darts hit the target, leading to a 33% accuracy total. The darts tended to sputter out of the barrel, dropping left and right.

I will upload pictures as soon as i can get my camera to start working.

If i can get a high-speed cameraand if i can get a clear barrel, i will test this experiment using a high speed camera to observe the characteristics of the projectiles while in the barrel.