Optimum Paintball Speed

I thought I should do a post on the optimum paintball speed because this is one of the few sports where you can actually choose the speed in which the paintballs travel. If you go to fast you’re really going to hurt someon and if it goes too slow than you lose a lot of accuracy. It is very important to pay attention to this. You also can change things around depending on whether you’re indoors or outdoors.

The industry standard is 300 fps (feet per second). Typically this is as fast as you should have your marker going because anything faster than that will hurt someone. Often a marker can’t properly regulate the pressure it puts in, so being at 300 fps might actually come out in the range of 290-310fps. Always try to keep it below 300. This is why you should be wearing a full paintball mask because you never really know how fast the each persons gun is shooting.

Indoor Speed Versus Outdoor

When it comes to playing indoors you can typically lower the speed. The lower limit is about 250 fps and you don’t really want to go below that because your accuracy becomes pretty bad. Typically you can hang around the 260 fps range when you’re playing indoors because the area of play is a lot smaller and you don’t really have to shoot over long distances, which brings a lot of other variables into play like the wind.

Outdoors you’ll want to go with a much faster rate at about 290 fps. This is just due to the logisitics of being outside. You’re going to be shooting over much further ranges and you’re going to have wind that will push the paintball in a different direction. Obviously the faster it reaches the target, the less likely it is going to miss the target.

For the most part, you’re going to be stuck within the range of 250 fps and 300 fps. A lot of people think the differences are negligable. If you can imagine a gun around 5 feet off the ground and shooting completely parallel to the ground, the time it takes 300 fps to hit a target 120 feet away is 6.3 seconds versus 6.2 seconds with 250 fps at a target 105 feet away.

In that case it doesn’t seem like the paintball speeds mean much, but looking at the speeds you can really see the difference. 300 fps is around 205 miles per hour. 250 fps is 170 miles per hour. Obviously if you had a choice between getting hit with one of these, you’d take the slower one.