Nerf & Airsoft 1

I modded nerf blasters for a long time, and recently I have been modding airsoft guns. Here are the differences that I see.

The Mind Set

Nerf modders do not care about realism - Well, not as much as the airsoft community - but Airsoft players like the realism. I find it strange to expend some of your limited resources of green-gas to move the slide, when you can use that to further propel the ammunition. Nerf players do enjoy realism at times, but they understand that, ceteris paribus: victory goes to the one with the better gun. Form over function.

Nerf Titan AS - V1

On the front lines of the foam wars, this was a weapon to be feared. After some modifications, the energy used to propel the heavy rocket could be used to jettison a single dart. It was never a mod for accuracy, but it had the ability to shed blood and knock over children.

Parts

Did you want a new spring to upgrade your M4? You go back to the airsoft store and buy one. If you want a spring to upgrade your Retaliator, you have to either buy it from a third party specialty seller, or you can accidentally find one. There is a certain enjoyment of exploration when modding nerf. Sometimes you find a motor upgrade from a robotics retailer in Europe. Sometimes you discover a suitable O-ring from Home Depot. However, everything you want for airsoft is usually found at the same place you got the gun.

A link to the blog of a friend of mine that I once played nerf with. His mods are well respected in the nerf community, and are sold on his ebay.

Safety

I’ll be honest. Airsoft is more safe than Nerf since rules are usually arbitrated by the host. Airsoft has fixed rules and respect for the guns, while Nerf does not as much. Anything that is homemade is likely to be allowed in Nerf, from foam bashable shields to modified 40 psi fire extinguishers. Airsoft requires a maximum feet-per-second for your shots. Sometimes they won’t even allow melee weapons.

"Line Con" 2

Why do they even have lines? For one, registration is a service that they have to provide to EVERY person attending. Namely, a seemingly infinite population of people to only 30 registers, but look at it another way. How long are you WILLING to wait? Probably around 1.5 to 2 hours. I kept my eyes on the time, and we got through in around 45 minutes or about 43% of how long I am willing to wait. Knowing how much longer I would wait, I am guessing that this was the reason the At-Con Registration and Pre-Registration lines were one-and-the-same this year, in order to accommodate the excess of staff found in 2015. This year exceeded the maximum capacity legal in the convention center (likely due to fire safety standards), so to mitigate how quickly people enter, the bag checks doubled their purpose of security and population control.

Why do they have this many people, but only allow them to enter from one place (the escalator)

An army marches on its stomach and so do con goers. How much do you usually eat? Assuming that you watch anime because you were, after all, at an anime convention, I can expect that at least an hour of your time is spent seated in front of a computer or TV per day. And during the 4 days of Anime Expo, they are replaced with walking - meaning more calories your body was not expecting. So even if you did bring your own food for the con, you likely found it unsatisfactory. So, did you have to wait in line at the food truck? No, but you were probably underestimating how much you would have to eat.

This is some research AMV was doing for ALA. This is the reason they let people enter from a single place at the beginning. By controlling where people enter, the Con can control which booths are most important.

Traffic is a science in itself. Obviously, if there is someone in front of you, your speed is equal to or less than that person’s speed. Raise that to the power of the number of people in front of you, and you now see why it's slow. This is probably why the aisles were wider this year. Since you take up about 2 square feet of space, the aisles were made at minimum 8 feet wide (yes, I measured it). Sadly, browsing people stop and take up to 2.6 feet or 33% of the movement space of the aisles, creating random bottlenecks. Hence, that is why you waste 33% of your travel time.

"Line Con" 1

Nobody WANTS to wait, but it is a fundamental necessary evil of the convention. How much of your time did you spend in line at Anime Expo? I heard it was a 1 hour wait for registration, a 2 hour wait to enter the exhibit hall per day, a 20 minute bag check line every time you wanted to re-enter the building, and a 20 minute line for food.

The lines for Pre-Reg and At-Con-Reg were homogenized this year making it seem much longer of a wait. Chances are that they found the ratio of the two types to be too small for the dedicated human resources. Instead of getting 5 people to handle exclusively At-Con's very quickly, they chose to have only one person sort the people and spend more time at just one person to register them.

How much time did you spend walking in traffic? Assuming that you are human, you walk at about 3 miles per hour or about 4.5 feet per second. Nobody walked that fast, more like 1.5 feet per sec. So some simple number-crunching means that you wasted 33% of your time, compared to walking normally, for every time you were walking in traffic. How long did you wait for friends to meet up in the convention center? Well, they still had to travel in traffic too, so that's another 33% more of your time.

So on a regular con day (9 AM to 9 PM), you lose the opportunity to do something awesome for about 5 hours worth of your time. That’s 40% of your time at the con.