Ammo Test: Worker Gen3 ("HE") Heavy as full length

I have been meaning to give this particular tip a try as a long dart for flywheel use for a while now, and I also wanted to check out its "heavy" variant, so I did both.

Of course it's a sub-caliber tip. Note there is an undercut on the contact surface in further addition to that, giving a tip mounting result that is halfway between a normal dart tip and the original intentionally-unseated Worker factory assembly job. As a flywheeler I am not a fan of that detail.

This isn't a stock foam, so this next bit is just additional transparency that the foam I'm refoaming these with for the test is to spec and not crap:

Mass, grams, assembled as x72:

• 1.35
• 1.34
• 1.33
• 1.34
• 1.34
• 1.34

Well that's pretty tight, eh?

Chrono on the 9.0 T19, fps:

• 177
• 178
• 182
• 178
• 178
• 178
• 178
• 179
• 171
• 174
• 182
• 178
• 174
• 184
• 169
• 177
• 177
• 182

Like the mass spread, that's quite good velocity spread. The velocity magnitude is a good bit low for the 9.0 Hy-Con, but that's just because this is a sub-cal and so the tip deformation is reduced. If desired or apt, the critical velocity could be cranked back in with a tighter gap setting, though this would de-optimize or even prohibit use of full-caliber tips in the process (depending on how far one goes with that). Anyway, I'm not really giving the non-200fps-ness of the velocity any gravity here, it's just a parameter.

They fed very well in mags.

Ready for things to go rather sideways after this very promising start?

The dispersion test. Range was 52 feet 6 inches.

 

Yeah; not quite. Doing about as well as the Max dart, so not useless, but there are better choices for sure.

The obstacle strikes aren't quite that damning this time, I was shooting through a small corridor between chairs and columns and other items from where I was to this fence.

As the shooter who fired all these, the spread of these seems not to be anything to do with stability. They are as expected from a heavy solid dome, very well mass-distributed and very stable. I also inspected what I was firing and there were no obvious instances of wonk with glue, crooked tips or damaged foams. I think this with both this dart AND the Max dart is mainly strict dispersion, due to a mechanical precision issue with the flywheeling of common sub-caliber dart tips.

Messing with some of these barrel darts and some flywheels shows some non-aligning/forcible misalignment during contact (and resultant foam bending) behavior similar to what happens with ogive profiled dart tips in flywheel blasters, just less extreme. I can't be sure that is happening in the blaster in realtime, but it seems to follow.

I didn't test these against their short counterpart, maybe later when I have some more unused tips, if I still have any of my short dart stuff at that time. Nothing new is expected there though, Max dart behaves conventionally with the short losing some velocity and gaining a bit of dispersion versus the long.

Further experimentation this observation (sub-cals seem to be making my flywheelers less precise) leads on is pretty much: does applying tighter gaps to them to raise the tip deformation improve that non-self-aligning/misalignment retaining during contact/... characteristic and tighten up groups, or is this observation perhaps moreso about the geometry of the tip and its proximity to the known problematic ogive sort than the diameter of the tip? All the tips I know to be the most accurate flywheel darts are not just full-caliber designs (that could be by chance alone), they also have a cylindrical OD (not a substantial taper) and a very limited radius on the front edge. Perhaps these features are key.

But anyway as to this tip for flywheeling (within a mostly full-caliber compatible/optimized environment at-least): overall a large meh. Not only the lack of precision, but these tips aren't as heavy as I was hoping (ordinary waffle is actually just-as or heavier), and that's on top of the high cost and the present lack of availability as a factory assembled full length. If/when the stock of Worker full lengths clears out and switches over to these it will be interesting to give them a fair re-go with virgin foam of a different batch and maybe my opinion on them would be less negative just for the availability. I'm still going to bring these to some combat. They should be good for very rangey support fire from messing around with them so far.