A paintball gun is basically a mini-liquid-balloon launcher, isn’t it?
As to why, less mess more or less.
The paint in the paintball is already mostly just dyed water. It doesn’t stain. But balloons they are not. The casing is much more rigid. I don’t think putting an actual water balloon the size of a paintball would work too well, since it’ll probably deform and possibly pop inside the barrel.
As others have stated, this is indeed already something that exists.
I’m here to go on record to point out something that most people seem not to know about paintballs, which is that their “mess” is intentionally made of materials that are washable and readily water soluble, for obvious reasons. I’ve seen a lot of hyperventilating coming from certain individuals over the years about youths supposedly being able to permanently vandalize things at a distance with paintball guns and therefore they should all be banned. This is fiction. Rest assured that anything paintballs will do to your stuff can be cured by simply rinsing it down with your garden hose.
(This is obviously notwithstanding suitably motivated individuals from rolling their own ammo out of whatever-the-hell. A paintball gun will dutifully send downrange anything round and roughly .68" in diameter, with varying degrees of success depending on the density and/or fragility of the object in question.)
Not only are they water soluble and easily washed out… the vast majority of them are also non toxic.
If you get paint on your mask, and it splatters through to your mouth… non toxic. Tastes terrible, but its not gonna harm you via ingestion. Much of the ‘paint’ is … basically just food dye.
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… Also… a whole lot of police… just use paint markers (they are technically, legally classed as ‘markers’ because they aren’t firearms thus are not ‘guns’)… they use markers with pepper balls.
They just shoot miniature tear gas / skin irritant /eye irritant ‘paintballs’ as a less lethal weapon.
You can put a whole lot of different liquids inside what is basically a semi rigid gel/plastic capsule.
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The old devious trick I remember was people would freeze their paintballs the night before a match.
Nowadays, I’m fairly sure if you are caught doing that, you don’t just get banned from that field/course… you probably get prosecuted.
Thanks for the heads up! I’ve not played paintball so I didn’t know what kinda paint the standard stuff was using, and was mostly thinking about a way to minimize any clean up involved.
Kinda contrary to some of the fun of the game, but everyone likes to play differently.
yes. It’s a thing. https://mcsus.com/products/68-water-balls-tube-of-10 No clue if they’re good or not, but they exist.
There’s also paintballs with clear paint, or reballs which are basically just rubber balls meant to be fired out of a paintball gun.
There was a string of people swapping marbles into paintball guns for a few years here locally.
Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn’t chamber or feed right. What’s more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum “jawbreaker” ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.
In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne’er-do-wells in the night, I’d give it a second think only because mostly what you’ll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.
People were using them to shoot car and house windows out here.
