The Birth of the Ego Prime

As a pro player for over 10 years, I had always wanted to not only be the best, I also knew I needed the best equipment to be a winner; you don’t win lotsa shit using a lot of shit. This isn’t anything too revolutionary in believing you need the best equipment to get to the top and you’d be surprised just how far people will go to give themselves a perceived edge.
Our sport is essentially, shoot or be shot and if you can discover something that enables you to avoid taking that looong walk to the dead zone, or that enables you to shoot faster or more accurately, then you bet your grannie’s butt, the pros are gonna get a hold of it faster than a whippet with its ass on fire.

We all wanna win .. and we all wanna win bad …. Some people just wanna win, some people will train hard to get that win, and some will cheat their ass off to get it but it all comes down to being first over that line no matter which way you approach it.

Our sport's main body of tournament players will always look toward the pros for inspiration and direction; this is because the pros are seen as our industry’s standards of excellence, and rightly so, they work harder at their game than any other.
Our sport is just like any other in this respect.

The pro leagues are without doubt the most hotly contested out of all tournament leagues because they have the best players and they train a lot more than amateur and novices; It can also be argued the average difference in terms of quality between the pro teams is less than in other leagues and as such, any edge in performance can easily prove to be a defining difference for those who possess that edge. After all, you only need to win by the skin on your nose in a foot race to be declared the winner. And in paintball, that one slither of paint on some schmuck’s loader can also be the difference between you being a hero or a zero … it really can be that close guys.

With this in mind, I went looking for an edge that anybody could use, not just the pros but the problem was, what the hell was I gonna try and improve? The most obvious area for improvement is your performance as a player but I’m afraid I wasn’t gonna be able to get around to see all of you to give personal seminars but what I could do was try and give you a better piece of kit to use and so I decided I was gonna somehow try to improve the performance of a marker.

Easier said than done when you cast your eye around the high-end gats we have on show … it’s hard to know which one to opt for but generally speaking, you get what you pay for and so if you look around the marketplace, you don’t get no fifteen hundred dollar Tippmanns if you get my meaning?

I decided I was gonna go for one of our market's top end gats and try to improve its performance. I chose the Ego for several reasons; Planet, the company who manufacture the Ego [and Geo] is owned by two friends of mine, Ledzy and Julian, and it's also based over here in England. I knew if I could come up with a technical improvement, they would always be trusted partners. Actually, without those two guys, I would never have gotten this project off the ground, nowhere near. And so, I set about looking at the problem of trying to improve the Ego11, if indeed that was even possible.

A few years back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine called Tom Kaye, he was the owner of Air Gun Designs, the company who made the Automag some years ago ...the subject we discussed was the physics underlying the column of air that pushes the paintball out of the barrel.
Neither Tom nor myself were happy just knowing you could blow a paintball out of a barrel, we needed to know the hows and whys of it all.
Tom had done some real cool high-speed photographed experiments looking at this aspect of paintball ballistics and a few things impressed me when I saw his results.
I realised there was a significant effect when looking at the differing characteristics of the air-flow behind the paintball; those characteristics were an emergent property of the marker's design and the way it transitioned from the bottle through to the back of the ball. Long story short, the less turbulence there was in the airflow, the more predictable was the paintball trajectory. Seems sensible enough I suppose looking back but you must remember, there might have been plenty of people around that time manufacturing paintball gats but none of them were doing any real scientific data collection on performance. In that sense, Tom Kaye was a visionary and before his time. I knew the air flow properties in the barrel were chaotic and if I could tidy it up somehow then theoretically at least, I could improve the paintball’s trajectory.

The problem for me was to reduce the air turbulence in the barrel, this was my bottom-line objective. To understand how this was achieved we must first understand a few things regarding fluid dynamics; air is a fluid just like water and it behaves in certain ways that are pretty well understood if not a little complicated. I was no expert in fluid dynamics, far from it but luckily for me, I didn’t have to be, I just had to have a working knowledge. As the air migrates from the bottle to the barrel as the trigger is pulled, it makes several transitions through the marker and a couple of those transitions were through 90 degrees. Basically, the air was propelled through a 90 degree turn after hitting a flat face. Now, I knew from driving my car that I could keep the speed up if I went through a sweeping 90 degree bend as against coming up to a T junction, slowing right down and then turning through 90 degrees.

It was all about the ability to maintain velocity through a 90 degree turn thus decreasing the destabalising effects on the air column behind the ball, if I could manage that then I knew that would reduce the foot per second variance … and so it was this aspect of the marker’s air-flow I then turned my attention to. I looked at the components that dictated those 90 degree turns and redesigned them so they transitioned the air-flow using a three-dimensional curved path rather than a two-dimensional flat face.
The redesign was crucial for obvious reasons and after many trials and errors; I finally homed in on the optimum design. I then tested them in the prototype stage and made the decision to go full steam ahead in terms of a batch production run when I finalized the testing. That was the birth of the idea …

Quite simply, the Ego Prime reduces the air-column turbulence behind the ball as it's propelled from the barrel and effectively increases the consistency of shot; as a direct consequence of that reduced turbulence, the foot per second variance is also reduced [velocity variance] and the Ego Prime has to shoot more accurately.
My Ego Prime cannot defy the laws of physics all the time I utilized the correct rationale in design, and the correct methodology in manufacture.
The Ego Prime shoots more accurately because it was designed that way ..... nothing more, nothing less.
If you want that edge, it's gotta be Prime time ......