What is Paintball?
Paintball is a game, a sport, a hobby, and a lifestyle. Just like most things, to each person paintball is something different. One thing, however, remains the same. Paintball is a lot of fun. Most people when they were young (especially men) played war games with toy guns or water guns. Paintball has a similar feel except it�s more intense, you use a paintball gun, and it hurts a bit more.
Paintball is part skill, part athleticism, and part team strategy. Every player playing paintball has a paintball gun, called a marker by people in the sport, and the paintball gun consists of several parts:
First there is the barrel. This is the tube on the marker out of which the paintball flies. The most important thing in a barrel is that the paintballs fit correctly into this part of the paintball gun.
The body of the paintball gun is the part a player holds onto. This section of a marker houses the board as well.
The board is the part of the marker that controls firing rates. It is essentially a circuit board that relays information from the trigger to the rest of the parts of the marker. Some are used to adjust firing rates to faster rates than you are pulling the trigger. This is called ramping and having one of these �cheater boards� in your marker is considered cheating by many, but is allowed in some places.
The hopper sits on top of the paintball gun. It holds the paintballs and deposits them into the marker. Hoppers on the less expensive level are only operated by gravity. The gravity pushes the paintballs into the marker. Others are battery powered or pneumatically powered to force the paintballs into the paintball gun more effectively.
HPA/Co2 Tanks are essentially the gun powder for a paintball gun. They house the propellants that send the paintballs flying from the marker. HPA is high pressure air and is the newer form of propellant. It is more efficient to use for your marker than Co2 but the tanks cost more money and there are few filling stations. Co2 is the classic propellant and can be refilled at almost any hardware store. However, it can cause your marker to malfunction at times.
Those are the basic paintball gun parts. There is more about these parts on other areas of the site. There are many different types of paintball guns you can buy. There are the simple pump markers which are not worth the money you save. The best for beginners are the semi-automatic guns. There are semi-automatic paintball guns out there that aren�t too expensive. There are also a lot of opportunities out there to buy good paintball guns that are used. The best way to choose a paintball gun that is right for you is to find a marker that is within your price range and will be reliable. As a beginner, you don�t need all the fancy bells and whistles on a paintball gun, you just need it to work every time you pull the trigger.
Now that you understand the marker, go check out some of the other sections of the site. You can look at the vocabulary section to see what we mean when we say some things. Reading through that will really give you a base of knowledge into paintball. After you look around here, you will be ready to grab your marker and get shooting. So go out there and spray some paint.