There’s an update from Airsoft Innovations regarding their upcoming Tornado Grenade:
MARCH 12TH UPDATE: MORE INFO AND NEW VIDEO TO BE POSTED SOON!
Synopsis of upcoming content: Trying to measure the velocity of a 90 pellet stream is tough! Tune in to tonight’s Byth Musters and see how the Airsoft Innovations team does it.
GRENADE RELEASING IN A FEW WEEKS!
Finally! A reusable combat effective airsoft hand grenade that kicks ass!
We’ve been working our butts off for the past two years to develop a reliable effective and reusable airsoft grenade that offers some pretty neat features. It’s easy to use and bomb proof durable. Stay tuned for updates to this page over the next few weeks. Take a peek at our first product video at the top of this page! We’ll be releasing more video content as we near our release date.
• Propane powered! Can be configured for HFC134a too.
• Completely re-useable. Just reload bbs and gas!
• Blasts 180x 6mm pellets
• Full 3D coverage. Not a shotgun blast or a disc distribution. A full spherical scatter!
• Consistent 3s timer!
• Tough design survives gazillions of throws! We don’t know how many blasts to failure, but we’ll keep counting.
• No loose parts to lose. Keep track of the pull pin though.
• Easy to quickly render safe for safezone handling.
• More to come!
• More exclaimation marks than EVER!Height: 4.9″
Width: 2.125″
Loaded Weight: 260g
Discharge Velocity: Between 65fps-137fps (first to last shot)
“Video?! Oh wow! What am I watching?!” The video footage featured in this first marketing video was taken with some pretty special equipment. We rented a highspeed camera to showcase our product. We tried filming it with consumer camcorders with disappointing results. Handycams just couldn’t show how our grenade accelerates pellets and manages to completely shower a room. Consumer video cameras shoot at 30frames/sec. A pellet travelling at 150fps will travel 5′ between frames and look like a blurry streak that’s 6″ long for a shutter speed of 1/300s. It’s just not possible to show pellets exiting at appreciable velocity and capture all of them with consumer grade video cameras even with newer slomo features coming out (3x speed). Our video is shot with a camera which captures 3000 frames per second! It fills it’s entire 8Gb of onboard RAM with raw footage in only 3s. It’s too bad, but we had to mount the grenade on a swivel pin to show how it spins yet keep it in frame. Warning: Camera Geek Speek follows. On the ground, the Tornado has a tendancy to run around a bit which really makes high speed filming difficult. Manually tracking a target over a 1/15th second event is impossible and keeping it focus makes things even worse. The lighting looks quite poor because the shutter time is so short. If you want to catch sharp images at 3000f/s, you need to have a shutter time that’s shorter than 1/3000s which doesn’t leave much time to gather light. This makes the exposure look really dim unless you crank open the aperture. We shot with a f0.9 aperture which is great for gathering light, but results in a very low depth of focus. You can see how pellets start to get fuzzy really fast if they’re moving towards or away from the camera. We also had to shoot really tight in order to show how the pellets spun around the body when they ejected because of the limited resolution our camera offered. We had 1024×1024 pixels to capture footage with. If we wanted to recognize the shape of a pellet and not have it rapidly become blur and disappear, we had to put enough pixels across a pellet’s diameter. We decided that 20px per pellet would keep the pellets looking big enough to visually track and recognize as spherical. They’d occupy enough pixels that even if much of their edges got fuzzy we’d still be able to track them. 20px leaves us with a measly 30cm x 30cm sized frame to capture our grenade working with good video quality. For our first released video, we wanted to showcase the grenade and how it worked. We also shot some wider compositions, but they don’t show the grenade so much as it’s distribution. These videos are being worked on for release soon!
“So, how does the grenade work?” The Airsoft Innovations Tornado Grenade stores 180x 6mm pellets in it’s shell in two spiral passages wrapped around it’s valve body. Each passage exits on tangent to the valve body which causes the grenade to spin in recoil when it discharges it’s pellets. Each passage exits on opposite sides and has a ramp which directs the pellets upwards at 45deg or 35deg downwards. As the grenade spins, the pellets transcribe two cones. Random bouncing on the ground opens up the scatter even further. We had special transparent polycarbonate shells made so we could show how our grenade stores it’s pellet load which spins around the grenade as they blast out. The grenade is mounted on a swivel pin to keep it from running out of frame. The spinning action tends to make the grenade want to run around out of frame or out of focus. We shot with a a big f0.9 aperture which results in a very low depth of focus so we really needed to constrain the grenades spin to get half decent footage.
“I want to know MORE! Who can I ask for more info?” Sorry, we’re pretty swamped gearing up for our first manufacturing run. If we get deluged with emails it’ll slow us down. We’ll be updating this site with more details as we near our launch date. Stay tuned for more high speed photography and pictures. We’ve amassed an amazing collection of highspeed videos which are being edited for release. Sorry it takes awhile to produce this web content and handling the manufacturing run has really taxed our dinky little organization. It cost us a lot in time and money to get really good high speed footage. We want to incorporate it in a series of videos that are really fun to watch.
