...As general curiosity, got a link or source for those "lightweight" ceramics? Would love to see how the 36s and 45s fare for target shooting or in-team events where nobody cares WHAT we're shooting (to an extent, no pointy things 😂) so long as we're inside the joule/mm^2 limit.
Also, if one built an auto weight sorter (been mulling over doing that, just wish I could figure out how HS5 and Clandestine built their "spinny vibration/airpocket check" machine) to properly sort the 0.50s, would you then say that using them would be the "best" BB on the market that fields will allow?
I feel like the downside is with sorting them you would still have different weights so you would probably need to adjust your hop for the different batches... hrmm. By my count (from your sheet admittedly) if you kept it at 0.49+/- 0.002g you would be losing about 35 of every hundred to the "out of tolerance bin". That's rough on the wallet, and I've no idea what I'd do with ~700 just slightly out of spec BBs from a 1 kilo bag of 0.50s. Really expensive shower grenades? Hehehe...
EDIT: Wow, um, yeah I'd rather deal with loosing 700 bbs to the "meh" bin; 0.68g ceramics are in the range of ~35 cents apiece (including shipping) which... uh... woof. That's outta my decimal bracket! 0.36s are similar price from what I saw on Alibaba/Aliexpress.
You're looking for ball bearings made from Si3N4 (~.36g) and Al2O3 (~.45g)- or BBBastard NITES for the former.
Well, if I had that kind of machine, I would have tested my partitioned .5s against the .48s and would be
able to answer that...but I don't know. My intuition says I probably would switch to using the .5s because I can see them well
enough that, if they're more accurate/consistent than the .48s, I wouldn't really need to see the BB at all anyway, after zeroing carefully. From my experience, you can certainly zero with them just fine (if necessary, moving to ideal lighting, using a bipod, no eye-pro), it's just in-game when they can disappear.
As for 'out of spec', if you've got a machine that can sort them, I'd hope it would lend itself to generating actual partitions, meaning - in the most extreme example - you'd have groups for .408g, .409g, etc. etc., so no wasted BBs!
But yeah ceramics are bonkers expensive compared to plastic.
I believe
@Masada brought in some of the lighter ceramics to try when he was first testing and tuning our guns, and they didn't perform that well. I'll let him chime in if he sees this.
If your gun can fire the .69s and you can afford the $.25+ cents a shot, there is nothing better. Not even talking range, the stability of a .69 ceramic vs a .48 in the wind is a huge advantage. 2 years ago at operation starburst I was firing .48s and having to make some crazy adjustments for crosswinds and missing a lot of shots, while Masada was just doming people with .69s. At last year's OP we were both shooting .69s and the wind didn't really matter. Got my longest confirmed kill ever. Great time.
My viewpoint is if you're gonna pay for ceramics you might as well get the weight benefit as well. The 0.45g ceramics didn't perform noticeably better for me compared to normal plastic bbs so I didn't really see a value in using them.
Yeah wind is a huge factor- because "wind" exists for BBs even if it's not "windy" [to the human perspective] outside. So much so that I pretty much don't care how slow my BBs go- I'd basically always choose more weight, even if they didn't provide more range.
Idk, while this "test" I did was very rudimentary, it still showed a clear improvement- not sure it's worth the money for most people though. I'd give em a shot, but yeah I'm not sure I'd care to crusade for ceramics if they didn't allow me to push heavier weights than plastic.
I've shot scopes out with plastic bbs. I always highly recommend a killflash for glare and bb protection.
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