Video Review #1: Basic Painting

Basic Painting, by Scenario Paintball Films, is a documentary on Scenario Paintball, with a specific focus on the West Point Combat Classic event. The back boxcover reads like the accolades for a summer blockbuster, with blurbs like "Greatest documentary and video of scenario paintball I have ever seen" and "...best way to get an exciting look into the world of paintball in the woods". With hype like that, my expectations when I put the DVD in my player were low. But after watching the film, I'm very pleasantly surprised.

"Canada-Legal" Airsoft coming?

A reliable source, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, just broke this news about Canadian Airsoft laws to the Grey Ops team:

"Airsoft in Canada may soon get a boost with the recent pick up of "Canada Legal" guns coming into the country. Seems that full metal AEG's and GBB's are being shipped with paperwork claiming they fire bewteen 430 and 500 fps. This sits them into the legal grey area occupied by .68 paintball markers and would pass inspection by the CBSA, full metal bodies and all. Now, what the paperwork says and what they'll actually test at is to be seen, as some seem to still have hang tags on them saying they fire at 380 fps, and would therefore be illegal replicas.

"Secondly, not sure how most airsoft players out there would want to be hit by bb's at 480 fps, so internal mods may have to be done once they're acquired in order to make them safe to play with, but this may put an end to "clearsoft" in Canada and give us some decent made, decent looking airsoft guns at reasonable prices.

"In theory, this practice could also be used for .43 paintball markers such as RAP pistols, but the marker would have to have a normal operating range of 430 to 500 fps, which is way beyond what's safe in paintball today. Several rumors are floating around at the federal level that there will be "Canada legal" .43 markers, but nothing seems to be on paper yet, so don't get your hopes up."

Will we Canadians soon be able to buy Airsoft guns and .43cal markers with the same ease as buying a Tippmann 98? Will we be able to import Airsoft guns from Asia legally? This is definitely some interesting news. Stay tuned to Grey Ops for more news as it develops!

Digital Camera RIS Mount Mod

You'd think, with all of the first-person shooting sports videos posted on YouTube, that RIS mounts for standard digital cameras would be all over the place by now. But that's not the case. Even with the GoPro, the state-of-the-art tech for recording action sports, an option for a weapon mount is curiously left out of their mounts lineup (pictured above).

After scouring the Internet high and low, I found one reasonably-priced mount that didn't quite fit the bill. It actually provides a socket to plug in the male end of a standard camera tripod, but what's needed is a similar mount with a post to mount your camera onto.


Of course with some sawing down of a 1/4 inch bolt, you could probably mod this piece so that a post sticks out of the socket to mount your standard camera onto, but it could be very frustrating. You'd have no way of making sure the camera would line up straight with the front of the mount when you screwed it on, and there would be no way of tightening it so that it couldn't come loose.

RAP4 offers an option for mounting a camera to RIS rails, called the Land Warrior system, but the mount suits that one specific camera, which might not be what you want to use.

However, through the use of good ol' Canadian ingenuity and brain-wracking, I've come up with what I feel is a suitable, and most importantly CHEAP way to mount a digital camera with a standard socket to an RIS sytem.

Airsoft, No Better Than Speedball

If the time embed code doesn't work, skip to 0:33

There! See! If airsoft is all about realism, what's this fanciful finger twiddling trigger action going on here?

Some, not all, airsoft enthusiasts tout the realism of their game, and bash the aspects of paintball that they say fall short of being realistic. Well suck on that fanboys. 

Tacamo M5K Conversion Kit Teaser Pics

(Sammy J voice) "NATO muthafucka, do you belong to it?"

First Strike goodness.

Tippmann X7 SCAR Kit

Well it looks like Mr. Hallak of Scenario Arms might be up shit creek without a paddle (not that things haven't seemed like that recently anyways). 

Camo Dip Kit

Recently Grey Ops has seen a lot of traffic coming in to the site from searches looking for water transfer printing (hydrographic) solutions. Well I think many of you will enjoy this find:

CADPAT and A-TACS Full Clip Products

Don't bother watching the full video if you have a short attention span, just read below for the highlights.

The Wolf's Den isn't known for their breaking news (which isn't a dig, it's just a consequence of Wolf's chosen medium), but Wolf's latest upload holds some interesting news/info for camouflage aficionados and paintballers alike.

Full Clip USA, a rather prolific gear manufacturer based out of the United States, will be releasing gear in both CADPAT and A-TACS in 2011. That includes lots of paintball specific gear, which is notoriously hard to find in the aforementioned camouflage patterns, and a very cool combat shirt as shown below in a screenshot from the Youtube vid:

A Closer Look at MILSIG's 20-Round Magazines

I recently picked up a 6-pack of MILSIG's new 20-round magazines, released in late 2009. In this post I'll be going over my first impressions of them, and the results of some basic testing.

Aside from the higher capacity, MILSIG has made other improvements to their new magazine design, with their product listing claiming:

•Steel magazine body pins (supports the winding mechanism inside the magazine)
•Steel winding cable (improved cable strength and prevention against stretching of the cable)
•Adjustment free magazine head (allows perfect engagement of magazine head and easier magazine insertion)

MILSIG spokesperson Jackie Chan also had this to say about them in a YouTube comment:

"Japanese made treated spring (consistent elasticity and strength - ideal for load and diminish ball breaks), German-made perfectly spherical ball bearings/detents (that do not come off easily from the collar like other similar products), High Strength Steel cable and gear winder (compared to low quality textile/nylon strings from others that snaps easily), Improved Body design and materials - longer life-span and integrity, Steel Pins vs Plastic."

Milsim Labs PG2 HEAT Rounds and RPG-2

PG2 HEAT in comparison to a Nerf Pocket Vortex.

Milsim Labs has recently thrown up some pictures on their Facebook page of their newly developed RPG launcher and matching foam payload. No pricing info yet, but most of Milsim Labs' offerings are very reasonably priced so I wouldn't be surprised if these were as well. Here's some eye candy:

The RPG-2 propulsion, simple CO2 cartridges. 

RAP4 T68 Operation Endwar Post Package

In a recent post I took a look at the issue of importing RAP4 .68 caliber markers into Canada, and cleared up some misconceptions about the process.

In case you were wondering, the markers I received and showed off in that post were Post Operation EndWar Packages. RAP4 pulled a lot of stock to put together rental packages for players at their mag-fed-only Operation EndWar game in October 2010, which left them with a lot of lightly-used equipment. The refurbished packages, containing a marker, 13ci HPA tank stock, and 3 magazines, are now selling for only $299 USD.

Grey Ops Testing of the Rap4/Tacamo Conversion Kit

I apologize for the lack of updates lately, and for my cluttered inbox, this week has been all over the place (e.g. I'm currently having to write and format this entire post on my iPod touch). I do have some interesting news for the blog though. As of next week, I'll will be testing the upcoming Tacamo conversion kit! So now's the time to get any testing suggestions in, or general inquries you'd like investigated. I believe I'll be testing the tippmann 98 model, but I'm not 100% sure.

P.S. If you're waiting on an email response from me that I haven't gotten around to, please comment on this post cause I'm having difficulties with my mail servic.

RAP4 and Canada Customs - Setting the Record Straight

Judging from what I've been reading on blogs and forums in the Canadian Milsim Paintball community, there's a lot of confusion about importing RAP4 paintball products into Canada. I'd like to clear the record on what exactly can and can't be imported into the country, and look into the origin of some of the misconceptions.

Tippmann Pneumatics/Air-Ordnance SMG 22

Oh yeah, just like that baby.

Fully automatic, runs of CO2 or HPA, 100 link ammo belt... and shoots .22 caliber pellets (got you excited for a second there didn't I?). It's often talked about how Tippmann has a long held patent on a drum-fed magazine system that was never implemented, but I guess it's been implemented in this little plinker, the Air-Ordnance SMG 22 (MSRP 550 USD).

A-TACS Danner TFX - Initial Impressions

This marks my first boot review for Grey Ops, and I'll try my best to acheive the same level of detail that Mike has set the bar to, as I bow to him as the resident boot expert. A-TACS has been kind enough to supply us with a first run sample of Danner's unreleased (due out in July) Desert TFX® A-TACS® GTX® Uniform Boots. That being said, keep in mind that these are not the final production boots (which Danner says will be improved upon, although I don't see a lot of room for improvement in the first place!). 

Morning Twilight Theatre -

Warning: This post has absolutely nothing to do with vampires or over-dramatic mormon drivel. Morning twilight is the time between dawn and sunrise. 

I just realized that most of the video dumps I do occur in the middle of the night/early morning (and I do so so as not to clutter other more important posts), so why not make it a regular middle of the night/early morning feature? Say hello to Morning Twilight Theatre! These posts will always be scheduled to be posted one hour before Ottawa sunrise.

Grey Ops' 2010 Montage:

Props to anyone that knows where the song is from without googling it.

Cidasoft Winners!

A huge thanks goes out to Cidasoft for facilitating all these awesome contests through us! Please check out my review and testing of them.

Now on to the winners!
Winner of the first package: Flint
Winner of the second package: Quags 1963
Winner of the third package: Taylor
And (drumroll) the winner of the big package: Zac!

Congrats to the winners, and thank you to all who participated!

Battle of the Electrosights

Blue Line, billed as "Canada's Law Enforcement Magazine", has an interesting article in their December 2010 issue on Aimpoint and EOTech electronic weapon sights (EWS). In it, they pit 3 sights against each other in torture tests:

A Splat from the Past

My good friend Chad was kind enough to lend me a part of Paintball's past, Gotcha! The Sport! I have yet to play it as neither I nor anyone else I know currently owns an NES, but come hell or high water I'll eventually play this game. Along with the game, the parent company Entertech also marketed "paintball markers" (I bracket that, because it's definitely a stretch), that are still floating around somewhere on eBay (example shown below).

If you did manage to mark someone with the "Commando Gun" and document it, you'd be a paintball legend.

In my opinion, the marketing of painball video games will always fall flat. I'd rather be playing real paintball on the weekend, and if I am stuck inside in front of a console, I'd rather play a game where I'm shooting real people (as opposed to a game where you pretend to actually shoot people). I'm sure a psychologist wold have something to say about that.

SEALs vs. Paintball Player: Who...Is...DEADLIEST???

It's come to my attention that after my recent rant about the TM Series taking the #1 spot in the Top Ten Milsim Markers of 2010 series, certain people thought that I was being serious about my explanation behind the rankings. I won't name names, but they believed my story that the outcome was determined through simulations run by the team at that obnoxious Spike TV program, Deadliest Warrior.


I thought the image of a lone nut in paintball pants jumping into the fight to gank a bunch of SpecOps types with a toy gun would be enough to make people realize I was joking. BUT just to make things clear here: Neither Grey Ops nor Hitman Paintball are/were in any way affiliated with the "high-tech fight club" known as Deadliest Warrior. They had no hand in helping out with the marker rankings, they've probably never heard of us, and there's no INOPS SUSPICIO MEMBER vs. ZULU WARRIOR episode in the works. (Besides, we know the Zulu warrior wouldn't stand a chance anyway).

And although this has nothing to do with this post, I have to say that the image below is the most awesome freeze-frame I've ever seen. Readers I present to you, a man maniacally crushing skulls on a table:

Arctic (Snow) Camouflage From PenCott

Press release found on Strike-Hold

Lawrence, the marketing director of Hyde Definition (the creators of PenCott) has announced some interesting looking arctic camouflage through his personal blog, Strike-Hold. Here's the ad copy:

"Further showcasing the multi-environment versatility of the PenCott™ camouflage pattern, Hyde Definition announces the PenCott-Snowdrift™ colourway for snow-covered mountain, woodland and other broken- or mixed-terrain environments.

The traditional approach to “snow camouflage” has been to use a plain, solid white coloured over-garment; however, this does not take in to account the extent of shadows and other textures that actually exist in a snow-covered environment. Some historical patterns, such as the famous German “pine needles” pattern, have attempted to incorporate a disruptive element, and more recently the Finnish M/05 and USMC patterns used digital pattern geometry to improve disruption and concealment.

However, by adapting the naturalistic, complex, multi-scalar, hybrid, fractal geometry of PenCott, we believe we’ve developed a superior camouflage for a wider range of snow-covered terrain than any other pattern currently available.

MIKE'S RANT OF THE MONTH: TM Series at No. 1?

This month's rant is less of a rant, and more of a BEEF. Long a bastion of Hip Hop and WWE wrestling, I'm bringing the beef to the world of Paintball - although this beef isn't really directed at any one person, but at a blog post.

Regular Grey Ops readers got to follow a recent series on the Top Ten Milsim Markers, a collaborative effort between Grey Ops and Hitman Paintball Reviews. Somehow, Empire/BT Paintball's TM Series markers snatched the #1 spot. This came as a surprise to many, who felt the Tippmann A-5 should've come out as the top dog, given its longevity and influence in Milsim Paintball.

I wasn't sure how Connor and Stan came to a consensus with the TM Series in the lead, so I went to ask Connor himself. He explained that they sent all their data on the markers to the team at Deadliest Warrior, had the resident computer geek throw it all in the computer, and ran 500 simulations on a program that had battle-hardened Spetznatz, IDF Commandos, and US Navy SEALs shooting it out with the guns in a three-way team deathmatch. Each time near the end of the battle, some lone guy in fugly Battle Tested Pro Pants would jump in the fight with a TM-15, and hose everybody who was still standing with 20bps. Nobody could figure out how this was happening, until someone realized that there was an error in the data. Apparently the info on the MILSIG K-Series wasn't available when the simulation was run (even though the MILSIG web store said it was), and it skewed the results. Unfortunately, by the time the bug was discovered and worked out, the TM Series had already been posted as the #1 marker.

Grey Ops Forum

So I never really did a good job of promoting Grey Ops' forum, so let's remedy that!

Here's why you should join Grey Ops' forum:

• No ads!
• Common sense rules
• The latest press releases as they come in
• The Rumor Mill (aka, all the stuff that's heard but isn't posted on Grey Ops' main page for various reasons)
• All the content that would clutter up Grey Ops.net if I posted everything I wanted to
• You decide the content! If you want something in specific that you can't get anywhere else, let me know (and it's most likely I can include it), as the forum is still in its formative stages.

Click here to register!

MultiCam & Fringe Science

J.J. Abrams' weekly sci-fi/weirdness television series Fringe is understandably focused on strange happenings. The show even features an alternate universe much like our own, engaged in a covert war with ours (and where a LOT of strange stuff goes on). A universe where the twin towers are still casting a shadow over Manhattan...


Where the U.S. DoD headquarters sits on Liberty Island...


And where U.S. Army troops in garrison wear...MultiCam? What?!?

Easy Fake Night Vision How-To

Click to enlarge

If you're looking to create a night-visionesque image for promotional purposes, or just to make your latest paintball snapshots sexier, I've come up with a short tutorial on how to do just that in Photoshop. I'm not a professional photoshopper (or a talented amateur) and I'm sure many aficionados will find my solution inelegant and not perfect, but its quick, dirty, and looks good.

You'll need a picture that isn't too bright or dark, with a fairly well balanced histogram, so the night vision effect isn't washed out or too dark. Here I'll be starting with a photo of a white-tailed doe taken in the Ottawa Greenbelt.

Tactics #8 - Team Formations

Smart teams at the small-unit level move and fight in formations to limit their exposure to enemy fire, divide up responsibilities among team members, and make it easier for the team leader to maneuver and manage his team. If your Milsim Paintball team doesn't make use of basic formations to move from place to place, then you're not only leaving yourselves vulnerable to attack, but you're missing out on valuable tactics that increase your chances of success on any mission. Whether you're just battling it out on a Sunday afternoon at a small local field, or moving deep into enemy territory on a mission at a Big Game, using proper formations can put you at a tremendous advantage!

Big Cidasoft Giveaway

I believe this might actually mark the end of Grey Ops' giveaway season! Let's go out with a bang, with a great package from Cidasoft!

Starter Kit 2A - 1 Detonator, 14 replacement bottles, 1 olive grenade pouch, and 1 removal tool!

How to win:

1. Become a fan of Cidasoft's Facebook page.
2. Comment on this post (in the form below) saying, "Cidasoft rocks!"
3. Profit (that was easy eh?)

Tiberius Arms Industrial Power Tool Porn Scandal

We here at Grey Ops don't pull any punches. When someone does something that we feel is morally reprehensible, we call them out on it. The last company we expected this from would be Tiberius Arms. So far, they've been an honest and upfront company that we've had nothing but good things to say about. That changed when I discovered damning and plain disturbing evidence of Tiberius Arms' involvement in an Industrial Power Tool Porn ring. Hard to believe, I know. But here's the proof...

You're all familiar with Tiberius Arms' logo, a spartan and visually appealing construction:

Well, take a look at this...

Warning: The image ahead is of a sexual nature (I think), could be pornographic (but I seriously hope it isn't), and is just plain weird (really friggin' weird). It's possible it's NSFW, but more than anything it's just weird. You've been warned.

Marker of the Month - Battered Old AK47

Thought I had forgotten about this feature did you (excuse my Yoda-esque grammar)? Well I'm just delayed (yes, there's another word for that), not oblivious.

December's Marker of the Month:

New Years Giveaway - Cidasoft Package 3

Round three of our New Years Giveaways, with Cidasoft demonstrating their continued generosity.

Up for today...

One Detonator Package and a Removal Tool

How to win:

1. Become a fan of Cidasoft's Facebook page.
2. Comment on this post (in the form below) saying, "Cidasoft rocks!"
3. Profit (that was easy eh?)

The list of top ten milsim markers continues! On to number 1:

#1: BT TM Series