I've been watching some airsoft video recently, and I'm wondering how do they work, specifically the magizines. What do the insides of a fully automatic airsoft gun look like? I understand the pelets are tiny, but still I watch these videos and I saw them just spray and pray like crazy and I'm like, "you don't have to reload yet?" I also notice in the videos that every once and a while they'll like rub on the bottom of their mag, what are they doing when they do that?

I looked it up and some sites said that medium magazines, which I'm guessing is your normal mag, for like M16, and normal guns, can hold around 200 pelets. Basically what I'm asking is where and how are the pelets held in the mag? Are they just piled onto each other and something inside moves them to the barrel? is it like a snake and there are rows that up and down the mag that hold the pelets? hows it work?

Thanks for all responses in advance.

Here are the videos I've been watching: http://www.youtube.com/user/scoutthedoggie?blend=1&ob=5#p/u/54/JB1vY5tkcFk

There are some guns that coil around "like a snake" and these hold relatively smaller amounts of ammo, but the guns that are gravity-fed, where they usaully fall into a hole somewhere, can not always be relied upon for every shot. And when they rub the bottem of the gun, It is a kind of "snake-coil" gun, where the belt is being fed into the side of the gun. They rub it to generate a little extra electricity to make the shots go faster, but runs the battery drier faster. such as this ---> :gun: . But, yeah that is about it. Not really that much to learn about these kind of stuff.

That sounds far-fetched, are you serious? :laugh:

I always thought when you see them rubbing the clip, it was a high capacity mag and they are winding it back up.

I used to airsoft at an organized level for a few years, and recently stopped after I realized I could have done something way better with those thousands of dollars I've spent. What you're talking about are high capacity (or hicap) magazines. How a hicap works is that on top of the magazine is a little trap door, and you load the BBs into it and they just sort of stay there until they are fed into the spring part of the magazine (the tube that actually feeds into the gun) by turning the wheel on the bottom. There are also midcap (mid/medium capacity) magazines which don't have the wheel and usually range from 70-120 rounds depending on the manufacturer and model. And then there are lowcaps/realcaps, which usually carry an amount of BBs in them that is equal (or close) to the real steel gun (real steel=the actual gun). But realcaps are more for MILSIM events, if I had to suggest a magazine to use I'd go with a few midcaps simply because winding after every 20 shots is not only an annoying task to keep making sure your gun will feed correctly, but it's loud. If you have any questions about airsoft, anything about it, feel free to ask me. Also, if you're just buying it cause you think it looks cool or you want to shoot your friends in the street or whatever, please don't, it's frowned upon by the airsoft community and can possibly end up with you in jail.

Maybe both?

At any rate, if it's competative Airsoft, remember that competative NERF gun players will actually replace the springs in those guns with higher-quality springs, just for an additional oomph on the foam projectiles. And that olympic swimmers will grow or remove hair in certain areas if they think it will shave off tenths of a second on their swim times.

If there's a trophy on the line, people will do a LOT of stuff that may not make sense if they think it will improve their chances even slightly.

No, please don't post random things that you don't know anything about, you're just making yourself seem silly. And please don't ever, EVER, compare airsoft to NERF. Also there are no "championships" or whatever in airsoft, there are no trophies. Actually, there are competitions in parts of the world like the Philippines, but not anywhere else really. Philippinos love airsoft so much for some reason.