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What is Mag-fed?
I
t’s impossible to talk about the Rise
of mag-fed Paintball without actually
defining what mag-fed is—and that’s
no easy task. Was the 1987 Tippmann
SMG-60 a mag-fed marker? After all
it doesn’t use gravity to feed paintballs, it is
loaded by inserting “clips.” Does that count?
What about a stack tube pistol? And once we
answer what mag-fed paintball really is, how
do we answer the question. When did magfed paintball start? Was it in 1987 when the
Para-Ordnance Mod 85 came out? Or 1994
when the Tagline TS1 was released? Or was it
more recently with the companies like Tiberius, Milsig, RAP4 or Tippmann?
I submit that mag-fed paintball is not as much
about defining the marker so specifically that
we lose the essence of what mag-fed really
is. Mag-fed paintball is a culture, a lifestyle
game and a relatively new way paintball is
played that cannot be defined just the marker being used, although you can be excluded
by the marker you use. So for the purpose of
this article let’s call a mag-fed marker one
that does not use gravity to feed paintballs; a
marker that has a quickly detachable/removable magazine, clip or something similar; and
maybe as a bonus (but not a requirement), a
marker that shows some similarities to a real
“gun.” We can nit-pick this to death but let’s
not. If you want to call a pump-gun with a ten
round tube stuck in the feed tube a mag-fed
gun I’m not going to argue.
February 2015