Paintball Somerset Paintball Somerset Click here for the main website. Paintball Somerset, think "Paintball People", we have a number of paintballing centres in the somerset area, please click on the above link for more information. Paintball is a superb outdoor activity that combines healthy exercise with fun. The basic game is capture the flag. Each team has their own base and inside each base is a flag. The objective of the paintball game is to infiltrate the oppositions base and capture their flag. Each player is given a paintball gun to fire environmentally friendly paintballs at the opposition. When you are hit with a paintball and it "Splats" on you, then you are out of that game. Paintball gift vouchers are available all year round and make superb birthday and Christmas presents. Counties Covered Paintball Bedfordshire Paintball Cumbria Paintball Devon Paintball Hertfordshire Paintball Wiltshire Paintball Norfolk Paintball Rutland Paintball Teeside Paintball Berkshire Paintball Derbyshire Paintball Dorset Paintball Kent Paintball Lancashire Paintball Northants Paintball Shropshire Paintball Wales Paintball Buckinghamshire Paintball Herefordshire Paintball Essex Paintball Scotland Paintball Leicestershire Paintball Northumberland Paintball Staffordshire Paintball Warwickshire Paintball Cambridgeshire Paintball Humberside Paintball Gloucestershire Paintball Somerset Paintball Lincolnshire Paintball Nottinghamshire Paintball Suffolk Paintball Worcestershire Paintball Cheshire Paintball Hampshire Paintball Surrey Paintball Merseyside Paintball Oxfordshire Paintball Sussex Paintball Yorkshire Major Towns Covered Paintball Bradford Paintball Harrogate Paintball Cardiff Paintball Edinburgh Paintball Sunderland Paintball Pontefract Paintball Scunthorpe Paintball Brighouse Paintball Huddersfield Paintball Birmingham Paintball London Paintball Manchester Paintball Sheffield Paintball Castleford Paintball Hull Paintball Brighton Paintball Glasgow Paintball Bristol Paintball Wakefield Paintball Doncaster Paintball Leeds Paintball Coventry Paintball Selby Paintball Newcastle Paintball Wolverhampton Paintball Halifax Paintball Liverpool Paintball Durham Paintball Leicester Paintball Nottingham Paintball York

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Paintball
Paintball is any game or sport in which players compete, in teams or individually, to eliminate opponents by hitting them with capsules containing paint (referred to as a paintball) from a special gun called a paintball marker. Depending on the venue, games are played on either indoor or outdoor fields of varying size. A game field is scattered with natural or artificial terrain, which players use for strategic play.
Rules for playing paintball vary, but can include capture the flag, elimination, defending or attacking a particular point or area, or capturing objects of interest hidden in the playing area. Depending on the variant played, games can last from seconds to hours or even days in scenario play. The game enjoys regular tournaments for professional players and teams, held by various leagues in several countries.

Paintball History
In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and Charles Gaines were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other. In 1981 in New Hampshire, the group used a "Nel-spot 007" pistol (normally used by farmers and ranchers for marking trees and livestock) to fire balls of paint. Twelve people participated in this first game, which was a "capture the flag" scenario between two teams. The winner captured all flags without firing a shot.

As national interest in the game steadily built, Bob Gurnsey formed the National Survival Game company, and entered a contract with Nelson Paint Company to be the sole distributor of their paintball equipment. Thereafter, they licensed to franchises in other states the right to sell their guns, paint, and goggles. As a result of their monopoly on equipment, they turned a profit in only six months.

The first games of paintball were very different from modern paintball games; they often threw the paintballs at each other, and Nelspot pistols were the only guns available. They used 12-gram CO2 cartridges, held at most 10 rounds, and had to be tilted to roll the ball into the chamber and then recocked after each shot. Dedicated paintball masks had not yet been created, so players wore shop glasses that left the rest of their faces exposed. The first paintballs were oil-based and thus not water soluble; "turpentine parties" were common after a day of play. Games often lasted for hours as players stalked each other, and since each player had only a limited number of rounds, shooting was rare.

Between 1981 and 1983, rival manufacturers such as PMI began to create competing products, and it was during those years that the game took off. Paintball technology gradually developed as manufacturers added a front-mounted pump in order to make recocking easier, then replaced the 12-gram cartridges with larger air tanks, commonly referred to as "constant air". These innovations were followed by gravity feed hoppers and 45-degree elbows to facilitate loading from the hopper. In 1984, paintball was established in other countries outside the United States; with Skirmish Paintball setting up fields in Australia and England.

Paintball Equipment
The paintball equipment used depends on the game type, for example: woodsball, speedball, or scenarioball, and how much money someone is willing to spend on equipment. Every player however, is required to have three basic pieces of equipment:

* Paintball marker: also known as a paintball gun, this is the primary piece of equipment, used to tag an opposing player with paintballs. The paintball marker must have attached a loader or "hopper" for keeping the marker fed with ammunition, and a compressed air bottle for propellant.
* Paintballs: The ammunition used in the marker, paintballs are spherical gelatin capsules containing primarily polyethylene glycol, other non-toxic and water-soluble substances, and dye.
* Mask or goggles: Masks are safety devices players are required to wear at all times on the field, to protect from paintballs. They completely cover the eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils of the wearer, and some masks can also feature throat guards.

Paintball Games
Paintball is played with a potentially limitless variety of rules and variations, all of which are specified before the game begins. The most basic of all game rules is that players must attempt to accomplish a goal without being tagged with paintballs. When a player is shot, they must raise their marker to indicate that they are out, and leave the playing field. Depending on the agreed upon game rules, the player may return to the field and continue playing, or is eliminated from the game completely.

Paintball variations
Paintball can be played using different variations of its basic rules, including Capture the flag and Elimination. Paintball has spawned several popular variants, including woodsball, which is played in the natural environment and spans across a large area. Conversely, the variant of speedball is played on a smaller field and has a very fast pace (with games lasting up to five minutes). Another variant is scenario paintball, in which players attempt to recreate historical, or fictional settings; the largest being Oklahoma D-Day's World War II re-enactment.

Paintball Marshals
Regulated games are overseen by marshals, who patrol the course to ensure enforcement of the rules and the safety of the players. If a player is marked with paint, they will call them out, but competitors may also be expected to follow the honor code; a broken ball means elimination. Some field operators may specify variations to this rule, such as requiring a tag to certain body locations only - such as the head and torso only. There are game rules that can be enforced depending on the venue, in order to ensure safety, balance the fairness of the game or eliminate cheating.

* Minimum distance - When being tagged, depending on the distance from where the shot was fired, getting marked can feel like a firm pinch. Being marked may even leave a welt. Because of the pain associated with being hit by a paintball, commercial venues may enforce a minimum distance rule (for example, ten feet or eight meters), whereby players cannot shoot an opponent if they are closer than this distance.
* Overshooting - Some fields discourage players from overshooting (also regarded as bonus balling, "overkill" or lighting up), which is to repeatedly shoot a player after they are eliminated from the game. It is also considered overshooting if a player knew the opponent was eliminated but continued to shoot, disregarding the safety of the opposing player and risking dangerous injury to others.
* Ramping - Ramping refers to an electronically controlled marker increasing its rate of fire (or ROF, in balls per second or BPS) when a player reaches a certain number of trigger pulls per second and then maintains that trigger pull speed his marker will increase its rate of fire. Ramping of rate of fire is widely prohibited at most paintball fields, however it is allowed in some tournament formats.
* Wiping - Players may attempt to cheat by wiping paint from themselves, to pretend they were not hit and stay in the game.