Well that was one busy weekend.
Saturday was our long-planned paintball outing. For those of you who haven't played outdoor paintball, it's an extremely athletic sport. Lots of sprinting, crouching behind cover, crawling around and possibly cringing in terror. Oh, not to mention getting smacked with 68-caliber balls of paint moving a few hundred feet/second. Doesn't sound that bad, until you realize it's not far off from getting shot by a 58-caliber musket. Of course the musket has roughly 30 times the muzzle energy, but that's probably a good thing. And you can definitely get some nasty welts from a paintball gun.
But as I said, I managed to avoid most of the welts and also most of the soreness. Which was fortunate because the following day Wendy & I were signed up the Denver Urban Assault Race. The race is less competitive than most. The organizers set out a number of checkpoints around the city which you can visit in any order using almost any route. At each one there's a challenge, such as a scavenger hunt, bigwheel race, or sack race. They also do goofy things like make you bike around with helium burrito tied to your back. At the very end are the really fun challenges - the foam pit and the inflatable waterslide. Ah, good times. We ended up 30 of 42 in our division, and 49 of 70 overall. Not too bad considering neither of us bike much, and Wendy didn't even own a bike until a month again. I didn't even have to feel guilty about eating a giant burrito, because it came at the end of a 20+ mile bike ride.
2 comments:
a musket ball has far FAR MORE THEN 30X THE MUZZLE VELOCITY..
I shoot em and hunt deer with these things...A paint ball stings...
A musket ball brutalizes..
No comparison
I'm assuming you mean 30x the muzzle energy, rather than muzzle velocity. I was talking about muzzle energy, and 30x the muzzle velocity of paintball gun is about 3 km/sec, which is really fast.
Anyway, it's possible I messed up the calculation. I did it myself, and I'm pretty rusty at physics. Also I no longer have the original sources or calculations.
But if you look at the .58 Springfield I linked to, it's listed at 1000 ft/lbs of muzzle energy. One-thirtieth of that is about 3.33 ft/lbs. That's not a whole lot.
I frankly got tired of doing the calculation to compare that to a fastball, but suffice to say it's not far off. So I think I'll stand by my original statement as being at least approximately correct.
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