You Have Entered the Nerd Zone, Prepare Your Body.
As my team was talking back and forth with an insurance agent about coverage for the airsoft field this upcoming season we ran into an important classification that was not well described by the agency, “The maximum allowed feet-per-second (FPS) is 425”. This insurance agency deals mostly with paintball fields, which makes terminology very different. In paintball, most of the projectiles are .68 cal. and can weigh up to 3.2 grams (g), with that said its easy to understand why smaller paintball fields usually only allow a maximum of 320 FPS. Firing 320 FPS with a 3-gram projectile delivers about 14 Joules (J) of force, while this dissipates quickly over a certain range, it is safe to assume the person being hit would receive at least a 5J impact (UH…OUCH). I won’t get into ft/lbs of energy right now because that’s another can of worms.
There are two ways that airsoft replicas can be measured, in FPS or Joules; as airsoft technology evolves it is becoming increasingly important to use the classification of Joules instead of FPS. This is because FPS only measures the speed at which the projectile exits the barrel, but Joules better measures the delivery of energy of that projectile upon impact.
Just check out this scientific chart (ignore the colors):
When we check players replicas with the chronograph we use a standard .20g BB, and our previous limit (only for bolt action snipers) was 549.9 FPS which delivers 2.79J of force.
With this new potential limit of 425 FPS, my team is assuming that means 1.63J is the cutoff (measured on a .20g BB) which is plenty for the size of our field and the general range of engagements. But this causes a problem when the insurance company does not give us a specific Joule number, because if we used .43g bbs as a standard then somebody could be shooting at 425 FPS but that puts them WAY over even the original limit of 2.79J in excess of 0.82J. The insurance agency also does not assign a Joule limit to assigned to a specific weapon platform, that means that someone using a machine gun (LMG/MMG) could fire 30 rounds-per-second at 425 FPS. This is not outside of most MILSIM limits, but when you tack on undefined Joule limits and lets say use a .43g BB as a control at the chronograph then you could get 3.61J of force delivered 30 times every second. Depending on what the poor victim of this insane volley of energy is wearing they could get anything from a small pink mark-to a hole in their skin that draws blood.
This is why we need to have specified regulation, because the hobby has never been and never will be about TRYING to hurt people.