Outside Context

On Sunday, my air­soft­ing broth­ers and I held an air­soft event on behalf of the little kids at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hos­pital.

Many people gave up their time and gave across their money for the event, includ­ing the Elec­trow­erkz site owner’s, mar­shals, med­ics and play­ers. The net res­ult was a com­bined dona­tion of £1816.68 to the charity.

My com­ments on the thread are:

Well done every­one, we did air­soft proud yesterday.

Pedi­at­ric Hos­pit­als do some of the most import­ant and heart break­ing work and any­thing, any­thing, that will help is help well received.

For us to raise £1800 quid run­ning an air­soft event shows that this is not a low and selfish sport, rather it is an emer­ging and fledgling com­munity that if allowed to sur­vive has everything to offer.

Today, we can hold our heads up that little bit higher and tomor­row some little kid is going to get a brighter future because we are air­softers and we care.

My new 1911’s gear up for the event:

So how did such an event come about and how did it go down?

Well, it star­ted as a set of dis­cus­sions over whether it was pos­sible to run a single shot only day at Elec­trow­erkz. Gaunt­lets were thrown down and picked up. This com­bined with the long held urge to do some­thing for char­ity led to the rather bril­liant idea of mix­ing the two and hold­ing them on a week­end. My involve­ment came about through my reg­u­lar Tues­day night stints as a safety mar­shal for Andy. I leapt at the chance to be able to get involved and lend a hand.

The games went very well. Split into two teams of red and green…

Red team:

Green team with Kiero and H&Kchick at the front:

…and sport­ing all man­ner of single-shot air­soft guns we kicked off the day. The way the day was organ­ised meant that there were no rental “new­bies” onsite and we were look­ing a fairly strong turn out of ded­ic­ated air­softers. The first few games soon set the tone for the day and the stand­ard of play was very high. Elec­trow­erkz has recently had some changes to the lay­out and the ground floor now sports a new regen point in a pre­vi­ously covered stairs. This meant that even long term play­ers, like the res­id­ent DarkAngel’s, were pushed to dominate.

A very nice cus­tom TM shotgun

In order to keep things run­ning smoothly the large mar­shal­ing team was split into two, with one team play­ing and one mar­shalling. This way, if one side looked like unbal­an­cing the game the player-marshals could be ordered to switch sides in order to even things out a little better.

Game scen­arios were very well planned for the day and included Elec­trow­erkz clas­sics like speed­ball, which is excel­lent when played in day time and using only single shot, as well as new games such a flag cap­ture. This scen­ario was very well thought out and flowed as follows:

One the top floor the oppos­ing flag col­ours were sep­ar­ated by the length of the floor. Each team had to come up from the ground floor and cap­ture the oppos­ing team’s flag and trans­port it back down their stairs. How­ever, the stair­case that the teams came up was at the oppos­ite end to their flag, so it was neces­sary to fight across the top floor to get to their flag. In another subtle twist, each team was allowed two defend­ers. They could start on the top floor under the opposition’s flag and could hide within 3m’s. This meant that any­one super fast, who got up the stairs before the oppos­i­tion, still had a (small) battle on their hands to achieve the goal. I was one of the defend­ers and had great fun keep­ing people at bay using my shot­gun and dual pistols.

The top floor from both directions:

The teams get ready:

Credit has to go to head honcho, DA leader and event organ­iser; Lex for com­ing up with such excel­lent scen­arios. I have to say that when I was mar­shalling I saw very little in the way of cheat­ing or unsports­man­like beha­vior. This is a sign of a well run event!

My load out for the day was my new “recon” load out that I have designed for sum­mer play or play in wood­land, where my full “Assault” rig would be too heavy/hot. I was wear­ing a recon assault har­ness with my pis­tols moved up from my hips (where they nor­mally live) to my pits using a dual shoulder hol­ster. I also had on my Chalker sling that holds the gun but cen­ter of the chest enables fast shoulder swap­ping in battle. To keep cool I was using a 3L insu­lated drinks pouch attached to my back. Using this load out I could move sig­ni­fic­antly faster than nor­mal without sac­ri­fi­cing a pro­tec­tion to the torso and abil­ity to carry weapons. It worked really well!

A high­light for me was in the “Mag­ni­fi­cent 7” game, where the mar­shals took on the rest of the play­ers and fought a retreat­ing action through the build­ing. In the final room, the “last stand”, I put my pis­tols down onto a bar­rel and blas­ted away with the shot­gun. Too soon I was out of ammo and forced to retreat as I did so a guy slid through the door on his knees. Instinct­ively I reached down to the bar­rel and picked up both pis­tols in one hand and opened fire. It was really a shock for the poor fel­low to get hit with double the amount of bb’s in a short space of time! Both pis­tols fir­ing on one hand looked funny strange to say the least.

In the end I hope that this will be the first of many single shot air­soft events at Elec­trow­erkz as the atmo­sphere was excel­lent and the crowd good fun to be with. I even­tu­ally arrived home at 10pm, tired and happy. A great exper­i­ence and a worthy cause.

Some shots to Trip look­inf very Geardo, like he was in Iraq or something!

MOVIES:

Movie 1. Whilst I mar­shal the greens and reds flood into the top floor and get ready for battle.

Movie 2. Flag capture!

Regards,

Basho

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