Airsim Training Notes
The following from Dave37 on the MVT Forum:
The week before last I attended my first Airsim training event, the Force on Force day of the 2019 MVT Texas class, hereafter to be referred to as Operation TeaSinker, in which the Heroic Texan Revolutionary Forces overran the Imperial supply depot, captured their supply of Evil Tea, and triumphantly it into the pure, freedom loving waters of the San Saba river.
Presented below are my observations regarding the use of Airsim training weapons.
1) They are definitely better than UTM. Better range, easier to hit with because you can see them flying, vastly cheaper, and they do not suffer from the catastrophic paint-pellet-stuck-in-barrel failure.
2) Beware magazine over-insertion. I had two failures during the final firefight where the bolt of my rifle would not drop on a fresh mag. I remedied these by removing and reinserting the mag. The mags would not drop free, and had to be pulled out with a lot of force, so I think I must have over-inserted them in the heat of battle. I also broke one of the feed lips on one of my polymer EPM-GBB mags, possibly from the same thing.
3) Wire mesh eye protection is superior to conventional goggles. On the first FoF evolution I wore plastic goggles with Cat Crap anti-fog on them, and they were blurry and hard to see through. Thereafter I wore a mask with wire mesh over the eyes. These are annoying at first, but once the shooting begins you don’t see the wire mesh anymore.
4) You can’t really zero an Airsim rifle the way you would a real one. I tried and tried to shoot groups and dial my red dot in, and the Airsim doesn’t really have the accuracy to do that. You get more of a shotgun pattern than a group. Just adjust the sights so that you are hitting a torso sized target at 25 yards and call it good.
5) You really only use the sights on the first shot. After that you just focus on the target, watch where the BBs are going, and walk in your stream fire.
6) You will need as many mags in your basic load as you would for a real weapon. I suppose this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. I thought I would be able to get by with three mags, and wound up having to borrow two more. The mags hold 40 rounds, but because you are using stream fire, ammo consumption is higher. When my team was on support by fire, we went through six mags each.
7) Ammo consumption is about the same as real weapons, on a per mag basis. It was generally 3-6 mags per scenario, unless I got killed early or was in a leadership role. Two cans of green gas and one bag of 5000 0.26g BBs got me through six FoF scenarios. Per Max, you get about 12-18 mags per can of green gas.
Dave didn’t use a school rifle, but purchased his own via MVT, the recommended gas blow back PTS MEGA ARMS MKM AR-15. Having his own allowed him to trick it out as he wanted, as a clone of his live fire rifle, and also gave him the opportunity to paint it in Rhodesian camo, as an homage to the Rhodesian theme of the class.
