Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-26257480-20170316004443/@comment-27306930-20170316051801

The data on the Reformer isn't in yet Arch, but it looks like it borrows elements from both the Modulus, and the BattleScout. And the main reason I don't already have a BattleScout ? Yep, you guessed it. Proprietary clips. Not goin' there again, my friend.

But if there's one thing I do like to talk about Arch, it's darts. Ad nauseam. So let me begin.I had high hopes for the X-Shot darts. They were reasonably priced, readily available, seemed pretty durable, and "visually" they had fairly decent aerodynamics.

But it turns out they have more cons than pros. First, they're about 2 to 3 millimeters shorter than standard Elite darts. Which is problematic for many flywheelers. In every flywheel blaster I tested them in, only 1 out of 3 actually fired properly. All the rest got jammed in the dart skirt, or in the throat of the flywheel cage. So from that perspective X-Shots were a big fail.

But putting that flaw aside, there are problems with springers as well. I found the X-Shots to be on the light side. The foam heads don't have the density to give them good flight dynamics. Remember that thought experiment with the billiard ball ? No ?

Well imagine this. If you had a ping pong ball and a golf ball, and I asked you to throw them across the gym as hard as you could, which one do you think is going hit the wall on the other side. Mind you, they're both the same size, and you can throw them as hard as you want. Yeah - exactly. You'll never throw a ping pong ball across a gymnasium. But a golf ball ? FORE !

The lesson here is, the lighter the projectile, the less momentum it has to resist the counter-forces of air resistance. So for that reason I gave up on the X-Shot darts. They're just too light. They might be good at short distances, but after 20 feet they're completely unpredictable.

In my book, X-Shots rank just a smidge above Elites. And that's not sayin' much Archie