Stock replicas usually don’t group well. After a few tens of metres the BBs drift further and further apart, so we can’t control where they go. Tuning the replica tightens the grouping, so the BBs actually fly where we aim – and that indirectly buys you more range.
Even if we had a theoretically ideal replica with perfect grouping, there’s still air drag on the BB, and here physics is unforgiving! With heavier BBs and more power the range grows by about 80 cm for every 0.01 g of BB weight, which I wrote about in the previous two posts. But for a perfectly smooth sphere the limit is the drag coefficient of 0.47, and you can’t get below that.
UNLESS the sphere ISN’T perfect! Add tiny dimples to the surface and the drag coefficient can drop to 0.20-0.25 – which is exactly why golf balls have those “dimples”.
So what if we did that on an airsoft BB??? We’d boost the range by 50-60%?!?
Back in 2008 the Swiss company Bioval announced the BBB DIMPLEX – a revolutionary BB with a golf-ball texture. It was meant to go on sale in 2009/2010, and Bioval’s director Stefan Valentino claimed in a press release that they’d achieved “fantastic improvements in range and accuracy” – without quoting a single concrete number.
After Cybergun acquired Bioval, the talk about the Dimplex went quiet.
In the airsoft community there were DIY attempts – from injection moulding to drilling little holes into a BB – but none of it was ever backed by credible measurements.
And why didn’t the concept catch on?
The manufacturing process for such a tiny “golf ball” was complicated, hard to reproduce and expensive. The uneven surface made the BBs jam in the magazines, and the contact with the hop-up became inconsistent – which resulted in unpredictable spin. But the biggest problem, again, was physics – because on such a small ball the aerodynamic effect of the texture is far weaker than on a golf ball!