Now over a month ago, and OP Red Dawn has come and gone… First things first, the AO itself was awesome. I got to play with and against players primarily from other parts of BC and from AB, some of whom were extremely skilled players with awesome equipment. Got to see some old friends from airsoft that attended this game that I haven’t seen in years. I more or less forgot how much fun airsoft can be – especially when compared to the dreary reality that “Drop In” game days have become at my (public) local field – and I had an absolute blast running around a ghost town with friends.
Photo credits to “Loops”
While most of my playing time was in the middle of the night, the following sequence was cut together & shows what was probably my most adrenaline-fueled daytime offensive during the weekend:
My loadout looked a little something like this, with only minor changes the night before:
I’m slogging my way through weekly Contour footage dating as far back as May (I really should have gotten on top of this sooner). I’ve slimmed the remaining footage down to about 5 hours worth of clips from local airsoft games during the second half of the summer (Montage #2), then that video will be followed by footage from Operation Iceback 2.0 (Montage #3) – finally. Irregardless, here is part 1:
I do apologize that there hasn’t been much activity here on Overhoppers in the past month – I’ve been fairly busy myself and it seems as if the other authors are as well.
But as a quick something to post for you guys, I just finally got around to looking through some of my Contour footage for the first time since May or so. Here’s the first of at least 2-3 videos to come from Omega Ops game days over the summer… Operation Iceback footage will eventually make it through, as well.
For reference, the song is not mine: Coldplay – Clocks (Rogue Dubstep Remix)… damn “Jester” has gotten me started on listening to a bunch of EDM, as a result of overhearing him practice for his DJ gigs.
So recently after the winter hiatus I got back into airsoft, kicking off the spring by picking up LCT’s AS-VAL.
Below is a short video of the unboxing when I received it from Julian at Airsoft Gear back in May.
The gun is built solid as a rock, as you would come to expect with LCT’s build quality. Most of the components on the gun are made of high quality steel, everything from the suppressor to the receiver and the stock. It certainly adds to the weight of the gun but its not overbearing. After about a month or so of fielding the gun it definitely lives up to the LCT internal quality. In the time I’ve had it I haven’t done any upgrades to it, its bone stock and I wouldn’t have it any other way. With the stock build the gun can effectively reach out to 180 ft +. Currently I have no plans to upgrade the gun until something breaks, but something tells me that will be a while.
Additionally the AS-VAL features the rail bracketing system allowing a User to install a scope mount onto the side of the rifle easily. On top of that LCT has just released suppressor rail adapters which allow the user to add a vertical grip, flash light or other accessories to the front end of the gun.
The only con I see with the gun, which is incredibly minor, are the mags. The AS-VAL has proprietary mags so you need to order the specific mags to run the gun. Currently LCT only has low-cap mags at 50 rounds each. While King Arms, G&G and Echo 1 all have AS-VALs or VSS Vintorez on the market I haven’t had the opportunity to test out compatibility. On the plus side, the mags are just a little larger than M4 mags and can easily be run in M4 pouches.
I was out there running my recently reassembled 14.5″ PTW upper today – I’m definitely loving the rail; it’s a keeper!
No issues thus far with the rail system itself, though I will probably have to play around with moving that sling mount around a bit. The Parallax Tactical FFSSR Keymod has got the right profile for the job, and it certainly seems to be a bit of a head-turner.
I was just thinking that one of the next purchases for this upper will be a short BCM Gunfighter Vertical Grip. Then I started thinking about how my experiments thus far with mounting various forward grips to this slim profile rail utilizing a Keymod rail section have usually just been not quite comfortable enough, as there will be a little bit of a ledge between the vertical grip, rail section, and rail itself. This lead to me going online to see if there was a lower profile Keymod rail section out there than the one lonesome Parallax 5-slot I have at the moment… or better yet, see if there was some sort of Keymod-mounted vertical grip out there on the market yet that would feel similar. But upon booting up my computer, I logged onto Facebook to see what was new (hurray for social media habits), and lo and behold! This is what I saw as Larry Vickers’ recent status update: https://www.facebook.com/LarryVickers/posts/10154067361950416
Yes – Vickers just got some pre-production BCM Keymod stubby vertical grips (photo comes from his Facebook post). Perfect timing… now, the wait for these to be released begins!
Let’s be honest about this – playing Airsoft in the rain sucks. For days when the passion alone just isn’t enough to convince myself that I really want to go to the field and curse my silly obsession, I’m usually looking to replace that trigger time with some other form of shooting stuff.
… And that about sums up the past 4 months of indoor footage captured at Anthony and Albert’s private indoor range.
I haven’t enjoyed a pure run and gun day this much in ages… I guess I’ve just forgotten what airsoft is once you remove all the politics and business and other assorted bullshit that I’m all too accustomed to when it comes to this sort of obsessive hobby. Was certainly nice to get out there and run two new guns through their paces – Jetlag was running my new Echo1 SOF3 (a bit of a sleeper compared to how much crap I usually like to put on my guns, proportional to how much work goes into the internals), and I got the opportunity to run my CA SA58 for the what will probably be the last time, as well as got my first few kills on my brand new LCT AKS-74M.
Footage from quick and simple games with Team Avengers and Panther Airsoft Club this past Sunday. Most of these clips depict kills, though some of them I have kept in there because they’re just hilarious to listen to… usually just Jetlag yelling stupid stuff while getting shot at. At the end there’s a little clip of me screwing with Sunny D’s gear and mags, as per the usual. All of it just for fun – which it certainly was… well, for Jetlag and I, at least. And it helped that we were at about 10,000 BB’s dumped downrange in a day, between the two of us.
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