Network Airsoft was launched a few days ago but it has a great group of members who have alread started posting in the forum, uploading their airsoft pics and pimping out their profiles.

The latest feature of the network is the ability for members to upload videos. Other things members can do (as well as the previously mentioned forum posting and photo sharing) include writing on your very own airsoft blog, being featured on the HomePage if you post something cool and of of course you can invite friends and make friends on the network.

Network Airsoft is going to keep getting better and I have a few surprises for the members which will be revealed with in the next couple of weeks.

If you have not joined already then get on Network Airsoft now!

King of the Hill

Often overlooked is the very easy to setup King of the Hill. This is the same game you played as a kid shoving people from the top of a hill, pile of gravel, or snow mound with a twist. Everyone is armed to the teeth! There are two common ways to play this great airsoft game. The basic way is simple and should be played over a large area such as the side of a large hill that isn’t too steep. A small team defends the hill from a larger attacking team. With elevation as an advantage, it can be difficult to take that hill. The other way will require some hard work and permission from landowners. You can dig small trenches or build some bunkers and turn this simple game into a more complex military simulation. This requires a lot of hard work but is as fun to setup as it is to play. The trenches and bunkers will require a lot of strategy as opposed to just running up the hill with guns blazing.

Injured General (Drag the Doll)

One of my personal favorites requires a great deal of teamwork and is best played with at least 15 people. This is Injured General or Drag the Doll. A large stuffed “Thing” is placed in the middle of the play area and whatever team drags it to their base first, wins. If you can somehow make it look like a person and weigh 75-100 pounds, it’s awesome. If you don’t have time for all that, a hay bale or old punching bag works just fine. The trick with this game is cover fire. If you don’t cover the guy dragging the “injured general” you are screwed. This is best played with a permadeath as each game is very short unless you have a lot of cover around.

Hidden Cache

Hidden Cache is an airsoft game that requires each player to only use pistols. Somewhere on the playing field will be a box, hole, suitcase, or something hidden that contains a couple M4’s or other automatics. This airsoft game is great fun as everyone has to engage in close quarters combat to effectively shoot each other. Once a team finds the hidden cache, everything changes. The team with only pistols is forced to play strategically until they can take down one of the players with the automatics and claim it for their own team.

These are just a couple of fun airsoft games that people just don’t play much. This can be because there just aren’t enough people around to play or many other factors. Airsoft is very rewarding but like any sport, you have to mix things up once in a while or you will probably get bored.

First thing is that this is a heavyweight gun in all senses of the word. It inspires confidence and a certain amount of respect among the bad guys. You can fire it from the hip in a sustained advance and it really will generate shock and awe.

As a heavy wieght you really need an M249 sling to carry the weight and this will push up the cost by requiring a front sling swivel which can either be the rail attached version or the bipod attached type. I made a mistake and bought an M16 sling swivel which did not fit and of course now I have to buy an M16 so as not to waste the swivel! You’ll understand my predicament.

The full version complete with silencer is visually awesome but the silencer on mine was problematical and eventually I removed it, anyone want to buy an anal intruder? On analysis what was happening was that the hop was not set properly (see more later) and as a result rounds fired tore out the foam rubber lining of the silencer and blocked the barrel. Because there was no clack clack clack of dry firing as the rounds were backing up into the gun I was unaware and missed out on some juicy targets. Solution take off the silencer and you are left with the match version which in my own opinion looks pretty cool!

The hop if left to itself will drift out of true and will need to be watched. A solution is to unscrew the hop adjustment wheel and put a small piece of insulation tape underneath it before screwing it back on, this will keep it rigid.

The Author, G Man

My gun chrono’d at 310 fps out of the box. I left it at that because I’ve got other guns that fire at more than that and it falls within most site limits. A friend told me that an air nozzle modification (replacement) would push the fps up to 350 as the particular gun I bought had been downgraded a little for the UK market.

The rate of fire is phenomenal. My favourite local site has a 600 round ammo limit … you can be through that in less than a minute. Best go for short bursts and conserve ammo. Other guns I own with a slower rate of fire can sometimes be more ‘game friendly’ although not so effective in a fast moving situation or when you want to lay down plenty of fire in a short period.

What about CQB? Well there are better guns about with a shorter radius of turn but if you want to intimidate the enemy then there aren’t many better than the CA25.

The gun is a flat top with rail mounts to which you can attach accessories or you can put the rail covers supplied on. If you leave the top empty the gun does look more brutal and to be frank at airsoft ranges an optical sight is of little advantage if not totally counterproductive. There are flip up sights front and back.

The receiver has the proper markings and I checked the real gun web-site (SR25) to see that the gun was a good facsimile, it is. You can check out the weight of the real steel and the appearance of the variants on the web just punch Knights SR25 into your search engine.

Briefly the gun is a sniper weapon which fires a large caliber bullet the advantage of which is that the bullet travels further with more accuracy and stopping power than a standard round. Actually the airsoft version is next to useless on single shot and has let me down a few times in this respect.

What’s the conclusion? well the gun has got its faults and foibles but overall it rocks! It can deliver sustained accurate and effective fire onto a small area. On the debit side the magazines empty pretty damn quickly and single shot sniping isn’t its forte but if you want to intimidate people this is your gun!

Article and photos by G Man

Making a uniform or battledress or a costume is often a reflection of your own social and cultural background and this can result in teams and individuals all being dressed in Biritish or American BDU. Casting the net wider and reflecting the diversity of available airsoft weaponry is the purpose of this article.

The Author, G Man

You can make up a whole selection of outfits quite cheaply using the tricks and dodges that I shall describe. Aim for the flavour rather than the precise detail of a character. Here are some of the inspirations for characters I have made up in the past.

I made up my Afghan character with a shirt/waistcoat from an asian store, an Afghan or Pakistani flat cap, an Indian black sacking bag and a prayer mat from Ikea. To give you an idea of price the most expensive item was the shirt /waistcoat set at £35 and the cheapest was the prayer mat £1.50p. You can wear a camoflage jacket if you wish, or old style soviet webbing. If you watch TV documentaries you can see what the middle eastern gunman about town is wearing, on Sky News I noticed a Northern Alliance fighter totting an old American grease gun in the land of the Kalashnikov. What’s that about then?

The Russian Afghan War outfit started when I found a fur lined waistcoat in a girlfriends closet. Now, normally I don’t try her clothes on but in this case I thought it would go down well with a brown fur cosssack hat with a hammer and sickle insignia which I bought at A&A Airsoft in Newport and a pair of urban disruptive BDU bottoms.

A chance find of a 1945 mint condition officers trench coat was the reason for buying a wood and metal shotgun and a slouch hat for a Secial Branch Officer in the Malaya emergency.

A medieval fez which I bought at a re-enactors fair was the inspiration for a Kings African Rifles character, red fez, military shirt, white gloves, khaki shorts, black woolen tights, long socks, army boots and a Mauser rifle. The latter in the absence of a Lee Enfield.

Royal Ulster Constabulary … I bought a dark green winter windproof coat at Primark, followed by a dark green peaked hat at Marcruss in Hotwells in Bristol. A belt and holster with a Browning Hi Power and an MP5 would be optimum but I settled for a G36.

SOG, Studies and Observation Group were deep penetration reconnaissance specialists in Vietnam. I bought my tiger-stripe outfit at USMC in Southsea. US special forces often used the AK47 so that the enemy could not locate them by the distinctive differences in the noise of their gunfire, also the Thompson SMG would not be out of place earlier in the conflict.

The recent release of the FN Fal by King Arms makes me think that a Rhodesian army scout might be the next project. Lightly equipped these guys were often dropped by helicopter near sites where a terrorist raid had taken place to intercept retiring tangoes.

I’ve mentioned a few places where you can buy useful bits and pieces. There are plenty more. Camden market in London is great, the internet, militaria suppliers, re-enactors markets and military displays are good places to build up your stock of artifacts. Just a little aside here, I don’t wear insignia or decorations I haven’t earned but that’s a personal choice.

When you make up a character you don’t have to pay out a lot of money but buy one thing that is quite expensive and this will set the whole thing off.

Don’t make the mistake of weathering or dirtying a uniform to make it more ‘authentic’. Soldiers the world over try to be as smart in appearance as they can in the circumstances and even if wear and tear has diminished their uniform the sign of a good soldier is always a clean weapon. Likewise try to start a day with a clean pair of boots if you deal with military people they respect the effort that you put into your personal appearance.

It is possible to become a clean boot fetishist piling on layer after layer of polish. You can buy a kind of easy application polish with an instant gloss in Lidls or Aldis which will save you a lot of trouble. If you have a pair of tall boots or jackboots get a lambswool buffer fitted on a power drill otherwise you’ll be polishing all day.

When you wear an outfit that represents another nationality or ideology try to throw something into the mix which belongs to that culture, for instance my Russian has a tin of sardines in his grenade bag. There are Russian shops in London which can supply anything you require, look on the internet. Try to see inside the phsyche of the character. Why did they do what they did? What their motivation was or is? If you want a role model try Richard Attenborough as the RSM in the film Guns at Batisi. At the end of the day how you wear clothes and your bearing can be just as important as the clothes themselves.

To sum up then, if you want something with a bit of personality to it, find your inspiration either in the form of a weapon or a piece of kit. Do some research, books, internet or buy a large scale figure of your subject and use that as a model of what you want the end result to look like. Buy stuff that you can mix and match then get out there and knock ‘em dead.

Article and photos by G Man

On this question here I spotted someone leaving a totally wrong answer and dropping a link back to AirSplat. I hope that was an innocent mistake and not AirSplat taking up sleazy marketing tactics. They thought an MP5 was an M16!

I corrected their answer with a genuine answer.

P.S. Don’t forget to check out our new stock of airsoft guns for sale over in the sidebar!

You will see all the links in our sidebar on the right now point to the pages of our newly expanded store.

At Airsoft Store Online we used to work with Amazon to bring you deals for airsoft guns but we have made the switch over to eBay because they have a wider range of guns and those guns are cheaper and provide you with better value.

Enjoy the new store!

It seems some forum members believed our little prank, which we admit caused great laughter!

Here are a couple of places where we were talked about:

• Airsoft Forum
• Phoenix Airsoft. (We were given a harsh dose of “Pfffffffft” there!)

We pulled the same joke (but even less convincingly) over at our partner store, AirsoftStoreOnline.com.

I write this post with great sadness. It is a very bad day for airsoft. Today a Bill was passed by the EU that after the “unacceptable deaths among young people caused by, or in part due to airsoft guns”. All airsoft guns in Europe (UK included) are not allowed to be used any more unless given special permission.

Basically it means that even if you own the land yourself or have permission from the land owner you still can’t fire an airsoft gun there. You have to get a special letter from the government to allow you.

This is effectively crushed the sport, which we all enjoy so much. Thankfully I never splashed out and bought the Tokyo Marui m14 that I always wanted, so it is just my £100 CYMA mp5 j that has gone to waste.

Help spread the word on the airsoft forums so people don’t get caught out by the new laws.

I enjoy gawking at airsoft guns as much as the next guy, but sometimes I just want to get a cheap airsoft gun quickly to have some fun with. HobbyTron offers a Daily Airsoft Deal. which I’ve found to be a bargain every time. Of course being daily, there is only 1 deal there each day, but you never know, they might be offering just what you have been looking for!

Get 3% Off With This Coupon

This is special deal for readers of Cheap-Ass Airsoft Guns. Take advantage of it while it is still running! Save 3% at HobbyTron.com using coupon code: SAVE3D

What would you do without me

Here are some cool pictures of Big Man Size Ghillie Suits in action!

They may look like something out of Lord of the Rings but I assure you these are Ghillie Suits. In the next photo… spot the Wookie!

Arnt big Ghillie Suits awesome?