Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for waterballs?
A paintball gun is basically a mini-liquid-balloon launcher, isn't it?
As to why, less mess more or less.
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.
...
... 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.
...
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.
I find MCS' comment about "for applications where you can't afford case after case of paint" to be especially hilarious here, given that these are consistently damn near a buck a shot even in their bulk 500 round pack, (80 cents a shot in that case) but you can nab a 5000 round crate of top flight Valken Grafittis for $80.
Anyway, I use reballs for testing markers or fucking around in my garage since they don't mark anything unless you put a dent in it, and they can... often... be located again afterwards, washed, and reused.
Thanks for the link, and clear paint didn't occur to me, so that may be a good option too!
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.
It's a great way to bring up insurance costs for a car dealership. A lot of broken windshields.
Paintballs are trickier than just a water balloon. They have to be rigid/strong enough to survive the blast of co2 or compressed air that propels them, then they have to be soft enough to break on impact without harming the other player.
They also just aren't that messy. I worked under the table as a referee at a Paintball place when I was 13, and we played such that gameplay didn't stop when refs were doing paint checks. We'd toss people out if they were intentionally focusing on us but I got lit up probably 10+ times a day, every weekend for 2 years. My jersey and slider pants came clean in the wash every time, and to this day the only lasting blemishes are the shredded fabric on the knees/elbows/ass from when I dove and slid a lot.
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.
If it's a round ball that's .68 caliber, sure. I mean it's a ball being launched.
However, are any waterballs even that size? And why? A waterball that was wet would probably jam up, so you'd end up shooting a dry one and it seems like a lot of effort to reinvent the wheel.
Well, I wouldn't call them balloons. They are still pretty hard, probably so they can survive being fired. So at least it wouldn't make the game more child safe.
Couldn't see why not, only thing that might say no would be I expect water is less dense than paint so the weight would possibly be different if they where both full.
Freeze some water into suitably sized balls. I guess that technically fits the design spec.