Has the Glass Ceiling Been Reached?

I recently read an interview with Tom Kaye, the founder of Air Gun Designs and inventor of the Automag, that took place at the 1994 Masters Paintball Tournament and was published in 1996. At that time Tom discussed how paintball guns had reached their supposed glass ceiling with the technology available at the time. Kaye said,

We're at the limit of efficiency. In the late 80's there was a big efficiency increase. We were also part of that, in development of the turbo valve for Sheridan guns. Volume of paint coming out of the end of the barrel? We're pretty much at the limit there also, with the double trigger that we developed. We licensed that product, but the tournament scene has said that they don't want it. So you're not going to see more than 8 or 9 balls a second coming out the end of the barrel. So what we're left with now is reliability and part of the big reliability problem is CO2.

The important thing to note here is that he was dealing only with CO2. In the article he mentioned potential improvements that could come from compressed air or nitrogen, but in 1994, they had theoretically maxed out the CO2 technology. While history has shown us that some improvements were made in CO2-powered mechanical paintball guns following this article, there weren't any major improvements that really changed the capabilities of the purely mechanical CO2 gun.

As we well know, compressed air opened up a whole new world for the speed of paintball guns and electropneumatic paintball guns only furthered those advances. In the past 4 or 5 years though, I personally haven't seen any noticeable advance in paintball gun technology. Companies bring out their new guns each year, but I really can't tell much of a difference form one to the next other than styling and a few promised differences in their new handbooks. Efficiency has slowly improved, guns are slightly lighter and recoil has been basically eliminated, but whether you're shooting a new Ego or Angel, there's no real difference.

This makes me believe that 10 years after the glass ceiling had been reached for CO2-powered mechanical guns the current glass ceiling was reached with electropneumatics in about 2004. Since then, any improvement has been minor and mainly reflects slight improvements over existing designs. If you can't win with a 2004 Shocker or Intimidator, a 2009 isn't going to make much of a difference.

This doesn't mean that improvements won't continue, but they all seem to come from companies just sqeezing every last drop of potential from a very depleted sponge. I'd rather have a gun that gets 1800 shots from a 68/45 rather than just 1600, but to met that's just not worth $1200 for the new model. The situation, then, is that our current technology has been maxed out.

I'm confident that paintball guns will continue to evolve and advance, but I'm also quite sure that any major improvement will not be with our current generation of electropneumatics. Someone just needs to find a new glass ceiling to work towards.