Editorial, November 04
Not much as the run up to Christmas makes things busy here

Well it's a bit later than I would like to publish it.. but here's my monthly stint in this section. I've been rather maxed out this month and not really had the ability to get much written here. I really must remember to add to these pages throughout the month so that I have a more complete log of thoughts from the past month.

Holy flying BBs Batman! Of late had a great deal of fun testing out a new chrono unit (not mentioning the brand name for the moment at their request); not least building the computer interface for it by hand from supplied components. As the guys said that built the unit, chronometers certainly do give you an new outlook on things. The most recent surprise came when testing the production CA36C. For some reason the readings were all over the shop, and things didn't look good. There were sudden drops in power levels although the average FPS looked about right.

For the period after the tests I racked my brains trying to figure out what was wrong. All of the gear was suspect as pretty much anything could cause the problem with the readings. For some reason at about 4am in the morning I realised that 290fps with a 0.25g BB was about the same as 320fps with a 0.2g, and well the rest just fell into place. Handily from experience there's a notepad and pen deside the bed for such brainwaves. The short of it is, that the new bag of TM BBs I had weren't all of the same weight; in fact their weights were pretty much all over the place which gave rise to the varied readings. A quick changeover to some decent BBs from Airsoft Elite and the equipment returned some settled results.

Abbey's gas products have preformed very well in recent tests and come highly recommended, providing stabilised and decent power output levels. 134a Predator gas isn't hugely powerful in the cold, but is respectable, Abbey's Ultra gas gave the best readings out of the lot. For more info - checkout the Maruzen P99 review onsite. Oh, while I remember, there's also proof in the P99 review that some Airsoft silencers do actually perform a function that is more than cosmetic in nature. It's nice to dispell some myths occasionally.

As we get towards Christmas things seem to be getting faster and faster, although from my point of view I'm keeping on top of the email here by the looks of it, which isn't a bad thing at all. From a retail perspective it's going fairly manic (at least from what I've seen), and for the customers there's plenty of offers to be had.

I'm looking forward to a bit of a rest over Christmas I don't know about everyone else :)

Random links: Well I come across wierd links sometimes, and if I don't stick them somewhere I'll just forget.

Star Toons by Leah Rosenthal - I suppose you've got to have seen SG1 and a couple of things like Stargate and Andromeda to apprecaite all the humor. So sue me, I watch SciFi. ;)