Blaster



A blaster is a foam projectile firing toy. Nerf is the most well-known toy blaster brand; Nerf blaster is used as a blanket term for all dart blasters, despite there existing other brands and companies that produce dart blasters.

Details
The foam projectile blasters fire generally takes the shape of darts, discs, balls, or arrows.

Air-powered
An air-powered blaster features an air tank where air is stored via pump and released via trigger, firing darts or other ammunition as it does so. Air-powered blasters generally feature a high rate of fire or a long firing range.

Flywheel
A flywheel-powered blaster propels its ammunition through a set of fast, internal spinning wheels. These wheels are usually powered by means of an electric motor, although early flywheel blasters required the wheels to be spun up manually by the user. Since flywheel blasters do not need manual priming between shots, they are most often used on semi-automatic and automatic blasters.

Plunger system
A plunger system blaster features a spring-powered plunger that forces air from out of a sealed tube and out the blaster, propelling a dart forward. There are two common kinds of plunger systems: direct plunger and reverse plunger. Direct plunger blasters are generally stronger than reverse plunger blasters. The plungers can be primed either manually or by an electric motor, as seen with motorized direct plunger blasters.

Spring-powered
A spring-powered blaster simply features a spring that provides the power behind the dart being fired.

String-powered
A string-powered blaster fires its ammunition by using a large elastic string. They usually fire arrows, although blasters such as the CrossBolt, Codebreaker Crossbow and SlingStrike fire darts using an elastic string. String-powered blasters are common among the Rebelle series, often as bows or crossbows.

Torsion spring-powered
A torsion spring-powered blaster features a sideways torsion spring that has a plastic stopper on the end. When fired, the spring coils back together and pushes a disc out of the blaster. The only blasters to feature torsion spring internals are the Nerf Vortex XLR Disc blasters.

Trivia

 * Blasters are usually not referred to as "guns". This may be to avoid confusion with real guns and to distance gun violence away from toy dart blasters. Some exceptions include non-Nerf companies.