Hasbro has a long history of coming up with new ammo types, which ultimately faced a wide variety of fates ranging from near-instant obsolescence to becoming an industry standard.

We all remember the Ultra line, right? Hasbro got salty that 3rd parties were selling better and cheaper darts that were compatible with their blasters, meaning that Hasbro could no longer sell darts at a significant markup. So, they decided to make a new, "better" ammo ecosystem to force people to buy Hasbro-branded ammo for their blasters. (At least, that's what the online nerf community thought that Hasbro's motivations were, and IMO this assessment is probably correct.)

Hasbro has made a few more proprietary ammo types since then: Hyper, which is a worse-but-proprietary Rival, and Mega XL, which was goofy fun and which I kinda wish that they still made.

Hasbro has also made proprietary ammo types in the past. Let's not forget that the standard 50 cal dart was based on Hasbro's Elite dart. Vortex got a good run. Rival and Mega did too, and may yet see more blasters released.

It's not clear to me at this point where this new ammo type is headed. It would be very easy to be cynical and label this new ammo type as yet another Ultra-style cash grab that's doomed to eventual obscurity, but I think it's too early to tell. It might be that. It also might be good.

Again, the industry standard 50 cal dart is based on Hasbro's Elite dart - but that in turn was an improvement (in weight distribution) over their Streamline dart, which was a modification of the tagger/whistler/suction pattern that could fit into magazines. Design choices are still with us today that were not originally made with modern blaster technology or performance goals in mind.

This is a clean-sheet redesign. It's coming from Hasbro, so there's grounds for cynicism here, but it has at least the potential to be quite good.

Edit: we have links for both at Walmart now. That was fast! Both are currently showing as out of stock, but hopefully that'll change soon.

• Aeon Pro X

• Nexus Pro X

Commentary from Walcom:

Looks like we have some refreshes of some of the best blasters Dart Zone has made... and it looks like they're listening. Posted by Blaster_Time and floating all over the interwebs this morning, these two have some very important looking changes. Obviously all subject to change, but the Nexus Pro X is short-dart only (thank you Dart Zone!) and looks to include a BCAR on top of a stock and optic (as well as a rail attachment that holds a PCAR?), giving it this little PCC vibe and I love it. The Aeon Pro X looks to include a PCAR, and has a redesigned priming grip and extra rails and just like the Nexus Pro is only chambered for Short Darts. These are definitely some upgrades from the externals, we can only hope they feel solid and perform up to the standards that DZ set themselves.

How exhilarating, get excited.

Also, those look like AR15 grips. If they are that'll mean that these blasters are compatible with the wide variety of aftermarket and printable grips for that platform.

The barrels are low. That's . . . odd. I can't say what that means, but I'm curious to see what these blasters look like inside.

I think Walcom is right: this is exciting news - and DZ is listening, which is in itself also good news.

Who remembers the old integration competitions that /r/nerf used to host?

They were a lot of fun and brought out a lot of innovation, and Mister Nathan is hosting a new competition in the same style - a sort of revival, if you will.

If you're new to integrations (or would like some tips and tricks), then I'd highly recommend Mister Nathan's mod along series. He does integrations very, very well. His methods tends to be a bit more high-effort than the old ways of dremels and bondo, but well worth it.

This competition will run from Feb 1st to April 30th, and the rules are in the description of the linked youtube video. Here's the discord invite link.

If this looks familiar to you, that might be becasue you saw this on reddit four years ago. A lot has changed in those four years, and now this belongs here.

This is a collection of mostly GearUp and Sonic blasters (uncommon, but far from super rare) and misc. other green and orange blasters obtained through several years of trawling through thrift stores and kijiji (local craigslist equivalent). The key, in my experience, is to be both persistent (becasue the more you look, the more you find) and selective (for the same reason).

This is a documentary from 2016, but it's only relatively recently been uploaded to youtube.

This is both a more important and a less pleasant documentary than the headline description implies. It's the story of a man haunted by PTSD and digital escapism after a deadly plane crash, who turns to building a nerf arena - which then turns into a community and leads to them joining collegiate Humans vs. Zombies.

It's personal and it's raw, but ultimately it's about how much a hobby that involves in-person interaction, and physical activity, and tinkering, and intense gameplay all in one package can improve people's lives.

Practicality aside, it's very impressive that this is possible.

Here's part 1.

Here's GatlingTommy's blaster which, while also firing over 100 darts per second, does so with multiple barrels.

Internals and measurements

Reliability testing

For stock chrono numbers and another person's opinion on the blaster, here's Coop's review.

To summarize: The Sportsman is surprisingly reliable given that it is a hopper-fed dart blaster with a breach with a failure rate under normal conditions of only 3%, which is something that we had previously assumed would be impossible. However, "surprisingly reliable" is not the same thing as "very reliable." I'd recommend the Sportsman for superstock games and/or as part of an integration but it would not be good to count on to stun a charging zombie in HvZ.

This was originally posted to Reddit (and is being reposted here because Spez is a very naughty boy); some good points were raised in the comments. I’ll copy/pate them here.

/u/LightningEagle14

3% failure rate sounds perfectly acceptable for most situations, and honestly probably good enough for hvz. The thing that appeals to me the most about this blaster (and that is making me heavily consider purchasing one) is how easy others have found it is to convert it to a sealed breach. I remember seeing a couple posts about that, and the performance was superb. 140+ fps on the stock spring. A 140 fps blaster that doesn't use magazines would be great for superstock games. https://www.reddit.com/r/Nerf/comments/ia2kwc/adventure_force_sportsman_brass_breech_mod/

/u/Herbert_W

Keep in mind that reliability goes down dramatically when pumping the grip rapidly. This would be good for plinking distant zeds but defensively it's pretty poor.

While this is subjective, even 3% is too high for me when a single failed shot could end an in-game life that lasts a week and happens once a year. I love playing as a zombie, but dying due to equipment failure is pretty frustrating. I'd much rather die due to a zombie doing something clever.

This leads me to wonder what effect a brass breech would have on reliability. The stock breech has a little bit of chamfering at the lip of the chamber and a brass system could be made to roughly the same shape, so I'd assume that the effect on reliability would be small.

Worth noting: as I pointed out in another comment, the hoppers could be made to be removable. A brass breech would be a natural fit for this sort of mod.

/u/torukmakto4

Excellent testing rigor to say the least! It actually did surprisingly well.

A situational that comes to mind with casual HvZ use is that people in the bad old days often didn't know how to manage magfed systems or that leaving a mag loaded for a week (or a year!) is bad.

I once felt a random heebie jeebie that led me to idly take the mag out of a rifle belonging to the leader of a "semi-serious" squad at Florida Poly and unload it while we were all sat around a table working out the infil plan. Well; trust heebie jeebies. There were half a dozen outright FLAT darts in there. Foam smashed to about 1/8" thick. I don't even know how that happens unless you put a worn foam into the mag and THEN leave it for a year - new foam will not take that much of a set from a mag spring. He got 2 clips of new ammo and "The talk" about unloading mags nightly and all the usual stuff, but given how he played the game in general, he was mindblowingly nonchalant about learning that his mag had contained 6 near-certain deaths just below the few shots he fired in the last mission.

Anyway, where I am going with this is that unlike a mag (detachable or fixed) OR a revolver, a bulk hopper of darts would likely not lose reliability due to storage time, and if you chucked it in the closet until next season (uncocked), you might have 20 good, protected, darts in there when you pulled it out.

Brass tubing barrels always cause trouble when it comes to getting good feed ramps that don't present a sharp edge to rounds anywhere. Perhaps using something thicker wall for the chamber (at least) would make more sense? .527 aluminum would be a ogod dart-agnostic one, but since this is presumably not a large springer, maybe it would benefit from a step down to .509 just in front of the chamber.

This is the Chaotic Shortbus - three flywheelers with the triggers linked internally such that pulling the trigger fires a dart from each magazine simultaneously. It's seen use in several games of HvZ at the University of Waterloo and in various nerf wars across Toronto, and I think it came out very well.

It was made from a Demolisher and two Stryfes, plus parts from a Recon Mk2 (forebarrel), Rapidstrike (stock), Rayven (rail), Titan (muzzle devices) and Rotofury (internal forebarrel).

This was an unusual experimental build. I had originally planned to use it with magazines with secondary notches in order to allow a fast “reload” by tapping a mag upwards - but in practice, I’ve found that this style of blaster works best when used almost like a conventional single-magwell flywheeler expect that fresh magazines can be inserted more quickly due to not needing to remove the old nearly-empty one first.

This solves a dilemma that magfed blasters face in HvZ. On one hand, you always want at least enough darts in your mag to survive a charge - but on the other hand, reloading early will chew through mags. Being able to split the difference by inserting a new mag while still being able fire the darts in the old one is very nice.

The main lessons that I’m taking from this build are:

• Weight matters. A heavy blaster will make you more tired over the course of a long game.

• Being able to fire if surprised while reloading is nice - but having a quick (and non-distracting) reload procedure is even nicer.

• Having only two magwells would have been almost as good as having three, while saving bulk and weight.

https://torukmakto4.blogspot.com/2015/01/something-bit-crazy.html

https://torukmakto4.blogspot.com/2015/06/it-has-name-now-progress-on-chaotic.html

https://torukmakto4.blogspot.com/2016/06/misadventures-with-painters-tape.html

https://torukmakto4.blogspot.com/2018/04/chaotic-shortbus-functional-completion.html

https://torukmakto4.blogspot.com/2019/03/chaotic-shortbus-further-tweaks-and.html

I say "kijiji" becasue that's what people use where I live, but Craigslist/Letgo/etc. can be good too. I have a bookmark folder for each day of the week, full of . . . well, mostly webcomics to be honest, but the point is that there's a link to a kijiji search for "nerf" in each.

It's a system that I've been using for a few years now and I highly recommend it.

The second gearup Recon was a pleasant surprise. I thought that I was doing well to get gearup and crimson in the same lot, but hey, there was more lurking at the bottom of the box.