Field Operations Codified: The Chrono Station

Every field, that I have ever visited mismanages the chrono station procedure.

The daily chrono session is a serious bottleneck, particularly for large crowds.  Here is how it should be managed.

1. Player steps up and fires a shot.
2. If it's OK, fire a few more to make sure it's not a fluke.
3. If there is anything wrong, PLAYER GOES TO THE BACK OF THE LINE.

Step 3 is kind of the important one.  That entire line of 40+ people is waiting for 1 limited resource:  the chronograph.

There is no reason for someone with a shitty gun to stand in front of the chrono just to fuck with his gun.  He can do that in the back of line while other people proceed to get their guns chrono'd.

That's it.  It's real fucking simple.  Maximize throughput of people through the chrono station.

Field Operations Codified: Turnaround

A lot of fields seem to have issues with game turnaround.  They just don't run the games fast enough, and players are left in the staging area twiddling their thumbs.

The procedure seems to pretty obvious.

1. Walk out for a set of games.
2. After the games, check paint status.  If people need to head up, then head up.
3. When you get to the staging area, start a stopwatch.  Announce when the next walkout is, and give warnings a 2 and 1 minute marks.

That's pretty much it.

Pendleton actually took it a step further and was recording what groups were on what fields, as well as what fields they had already played on apparently.  I was actually kind of impressed by that.

The Efficiency Bullshit Parade

I mentioned what should be the test method for measuring efficiency in paintball guns a while back.

The topic came up again on MCB.  The MCB shitheads, as MCBers always do, proceeded to lie, mislead, and misinform each other with non-information, because that's apparently what decent people do to each other.

This time around, I decided to validate some of my previous findings with the test method.  I've run the test multiple times, and came up with the following numbers:

• Automag - 0.25g per shot
• Invert Mini - 0.25g per shot
• Spyder Compact 2000 - 0.20g per shot

Anyways, I reverse calculated the results and collated them together here:

Y CANT MCBERS MATH

The criteria for accepting a test:

1. They had to chrono the marker.  Duh.  An SL8R can get really fucking good results if you, you know, never chrono the fucking gun.  Idiot.  The most basic fucking thing, and you can't even do that right.
2. They couldn't be using the stock barrel.  Paint-to-barrel match is pretty important, and I figured if they changed the barrel, they might have cared about this.  If they were still using the stock barrel, then all confidence is lost in the tester's ability.

You'll notice a distinct pattern here.  Spools tend to do about 0.25g per shot, and poppets get about 0.20g per shot.  And as a further validation, the two Spyders and the Resurrection are actually using the same valve.

Misc. Takeaways:

1. I'm pretty sure my efficiency test works.  My data matches what others have found, as long as you filter out the shitty results.  The difference being that I didn't have to literally blow through hundreds of rounds to obtain it.  Don't fucking create a test that's so goddamn painful that nobody wants to reproduce it.
2. Why the fuck is everybody quantifying efficiency as "number of pods"?  Fucking pods vary from <140 to 160, depending on fill.  It's a bullshit way to report results.
3. Paintball player impressions are completely fucking unreliable.  For example, the person running the Resurrection test looked at the results and went "meh" when they were actually pretty good.
4. What's worse is the manufacturers themselves are just as fucking clueless as the players.  They have all this fancy talk of "engineers" and shit, but really, the poppet manufacturers could easily be claiming higher numbers.  You know those fuckers would take every opportunity to market that shit if they knew about it.
5. As fucking predicted, damn near nobody ever started from a full 4500 fill.  And yet you look at other threads where shitheads collate the data, and they don't fucking take the partial fills into account.
6. NO FUCKING EXCUSES.  We don't need to hear shit about how your results might be skewed because your gun was leaking or your battery was low or whatever.  FIX YOUR FUCKING SHIT.