Chaotic Shortbus: Further tweaks, and after-action report

I really like how this has come together, aesthetically. Everything just 'clicks' - it's a big beefy power tool that shows signs of use but still appears well-maintained.

The plan, as of the last post, was to use the front end of a Barricade to break up the flat-looking front end of the blaster - something that I ended up not doing because . . . well, it just didn't feel quite right.

You'll notice that the Recon mk2 forebarrel is still there, and that the Demolisher's front sling mount has been removed to allow it to slide backwards slightly. This was originally done to accommodate a Recon forebarrel's pseudobarrel, with the intent of having a long straight-fluted pseudobarrel on the inner barrel for accuracy . . .

 . . . which is a plan that went awry quickly, as it absolutely would not work well with mixed modern darts. Some modern darts - accustrike, k'nex, and aftermarket imitations thereof - have sticky heads that do not play well with long pseudobarrels, regardless of fluting pattern. This has been known for a while, but I started work on this project before such darts came into common use, and neglected to take this new information into account when finishing work on this project. There was a big "oh shoot dangit" moment when I tested this blaster with mixed darts and realized what I had done.

That's why I removed the inner pseudobarrel from the Recon mk2 barrel attachment, and replaced it with a chopped-down Titan barrel, which ended up looking surprisingly good. From there, it was easy to put similar barrels onto each Stryfe to tie them together aesthetically. I didn't plan this, originally, but I'm very happy with the way it turned out.

The inspiration for having those barrels chopped off at an angle comes from the Pancor Jackhammer, by the way. The pointy bits at the end have been sanded smooth - this blaster isn't going to accidentally hurt people that it barrel-taps, or at least won't be any more prone to doing so than any other solid chunk of plastic.

Functionally, this blaster works about as well as I expected - that is to say, pretty darn good. I had a chance to test this at a local nerf war (thanks /u/BLU_X3V2, for organizing the event) and then later at a staff game at Battle Sports. Observations and further tweaks, in no particular order:

• Using this blaster with three jungle mags makes it effectively a tac vest in and of itself. This usually works very well - six magazines is enough for most rounds of most games, and when it isn't that's usually because I'm playing a gametype that requires multiple trips back to a respawn point where fresh mags can be stored. However, like any magfed system, running dry in the field is not fun - and having only six mags feels a little restrictive, especially given this blaster's ability to feed from multiple mags at once which tends towards spammy play. 
• Keeping track of which magazines are active and how much ammo is in each mag is not easy. I quickly developed a system - magazines were used from left to right, and I only tried to keep track of the number of darts remaining in the most-recently-activated mag - but even then, it wasn't easy. An automated system would be more effective - perhaps one that fires a set number of times from each mag before moving on to the next (18 and 22 spring to mind as useful numbers here), and uses LEDs to indicate empty mags that need reloading. I'm considering making that as a future build, but I'm also considering a different concept that would achieve a similar effect in a different way. (Think "Failfire without the fail." More on that in another post.)
• A new mode of failure was discovered - a single tension spring is not enough to consistently pull three pushers back against three mag's worth of friction. This issue did not occur during testing; I attribute the difference to differing coefficients of friction on the darts pushing against the undersides of the pushers when this blaster was used with mixed darts. (This is one of the benefits of combat-testing with actual combat - there are always things that would otherwise be overlooked.) I replaced the single tension spring in the Demolisher with one in each Stryfe, which seems to have fixed that issue. 
• Using darts of less-than-perfect quality is an unfortunate necessity when playing in games that consist of many brief but intense rounds with a shared ammo pool. The darts at the aforementioned local game are mostly very good, but there are occasional lemons. I could bring my own ammo, of course - but my ammo would inevitably join the shared pool, and using my own fresh ammo every rounds could get a bit expensive. This is relevant because one particular well-know mode of failure - the one where soft or shortened darts fail to reach the flywheels - caused me a lot of trouble. The pushers in this blaster hadn't been extended yet, which was an oversight on my behalf and (I assumed) the cause of the issue. 
• Soft darts occasionally ooze out between a magazine's lips, and to counter this I glued some chopped-up card on top of the jungle mags that I made for this blaster. I glued them on with cyanoacrylate at the last minute, expecting that they'd fall off at some point - and they've held up better than I expected. I still intend to make a proper solution, though. I just don't trust them, despite past good performance. 
• Despite the Demolisher missile having no special effect in these games' rules, I still tagged one person out with it. This was done mostly just for giggles, and was accomplished by quietly running up behind an opponent who was bunkered down behind cover. Nobody expects the guy with the big yellow monster of a blaster to be sneaky!

After this, the blaster saw use in a day-long game of HvZ at Waterloo:

• Instead of running three jungle mags, I ran Worker 22s in the leftmost magwell while keeping jungle mags in the other two. I would normally fire form the 22-rounder, while using the jungle mags as a sort of reserve for when more firepower was needed or when reloading the 22s. This turned out to be a fairly good system, though it did have one major disadvantage: the procedure for reloading the leftmost magwell while retaining the ability to fire if surprised was rather involved, as it required both activating a mag beforehand and carefully moving that mag out by one (and only one, or else it'll fall!) notch. This was effective, but inconvenient, as it added an extra fiddly stage after each reload. 
• I had previously run into an issue in the staff game where the darts didn't quite reach the flywheels. At the time, I had assumed that this was due to some of the darts in question being old and soft, and I extended the pushers to compensate. However, during pre-game testing, I found that I was still experiencing the same issue even with fresh new darts. The culprit soon became apparent: the dart-ooze stoppers glued to the magazines were blocking the pushers! They were only blocking them a few mm before their normal end-of-travel - not enough to notice, but enough to occasionally cause problems. Cutting 'em down fixed that. 
• Disaster struck on the way to the game: the leftmost mag release level broke off! I was using 3D printed extended mag release levers, and had carved them down slightly near to the hinge such as to allow them to fit behind the PVC sheets that I had used to rebuild the now-missing back parts behind the magwells of the Stryfes. (In retrospect, I should have never removed those areas. I wanted to retain them such as to have a full trigger guard on each of the Stryfe grips that I was removing, but the trouble that removing them caused wasn't worth it.) The remaining stub of a lever was fortunately long enough to catch with a fingernail to reload the blaster during the game, but I did not have a fun time doing so. After the game, I replaced the mag release lever, and this time I cut down the PVC instead of the lever. It's a bit ugly, but at least it's reliable. 

Finally, I used this blaster in another local nerf war - this time an indoors one, played in a singe room with plenty of cover items. Once again, disaster struck:

• Scritchy noises were heard while reving, and then the upper middle flywheel suddenly stopped spinning. The middle flywheel cage would still fire, but only with greatly reduced velocity, and only after reving fully. I haven't opened the blaster yet, but I assume this means that one of the Demolisher flywheels has walked off of the shaft. While the blaster as a whole was usable in this state, I did not do so in order to avoid damaging the motor on the stuck flywheel. I ended up playing several rounds with a pair of borrowed Slingfires, and several more with dual Hammershots. Both of these loadouts were very fun to use, but nowhere near as effective as a working flywheel blaster. I had originally hoped that having three flywheel systems in parallel would afford the blaster a measure of redundancy, such that the whole system would remain usable in the event that one were to fail. While this has been borne out in practice, it is also true that having multiple flywheel systems affords more opportunity for something to go wrong - so, while the blaster is better able to remain useful in the event of a malfunction, it is also more likely to experience on in the first place! I underestimated the severity of this second effect while designing the blaster - I have yet to play one game with this thing without something going wrong.
• The screw on the top of the blaster has begun to work loose, and no longer reliably holds the shell halves together. This does not impair the function of the blaster, but it does create a visible ventral crack. I knew that this was going to happen eventually, but did not expect it to happen so soon. Had I more foresight, I would have build this area of the shell up before painting so as to create room for larger internal magnets or an internal latch, or added a charging port behind the battery door on the rightmost Stryfe so as to avoid the need to open the shell to charge the batteries. Of course, it's not too late to do either or both of those things, but it's still disappointing to have the blaster start falling apart this quickly. 

Overall, I'm both very pleased and very displeased with this build. I'm happy with the effectiveness of the basic concept - when it works, it works very well. However, I'm not happy with how inconvenient it can be to reload, to keep track of ammo in multiple magazines, and most of all the various reliability issues that I've encountered that stem from the fact that this build is made from repurposed toy parts. The stiff trigger pull just adds insult to injury.

Bringing this build back into fully functional condition would not be hard - there's just one flywheel and possibly one motor to replace, and one small bit of shell to rebuild then repaint - but I'm not optimistic about what's going to happen next. Perhaps there'll be more failures. Perhaps not, but in that case I'll have a build that while effective is just plain inconvenient to use.

Perhaps its time to make something else.