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Camouflage has always been a serious
part of tactical and scenario paintball and
even casual woodsball play. In the early
days of paintball, players wore military
surplus BDU camouflage and even painted their faces to help blend in with their
surroundings. As paintball equipment
evolved, tournament players may have
shunned camouflage for more brightly
colored clothing but the serious woodsball players they left behind were finally
greeted by numerous paintball companies offering camouflage pants and jerseys, along with camouflage goggles and
accessories.
Ghillie suits, put to good use by snipers,
sharp shooters and scouts from military
and police forces around the globe to
blend into their surroundings and keep
the wearer concealed, have almost always been used for paintball, but paintball guns and the ammunition they fire,
round .68 caliber paintballs, made serious “sniping” difficult at best. Even with
the most expensive paintball guns, high
quality aftermarket barrels and the best
paintballs, accuracy is never a guarantee and those wearing ghillie suits were
forced into more of an ambush role, utilizing concealment to allow opponents to
draw close before firing in the hopes of
eliminating targets while remaining out
of sight. This has all changed with the
recent entry into the game of the First
Strike paintball round. A spin-stabilized
paintball offered by Tiberius, the First
Strike round is a paintball with a small,
spiral-rifled fin system at its rear that
drastically enhances both range and accuracy. With the advent of First Strike
rounds and magazine-fed paintball guns
designed to shoot them like those from
Tiberius, Spyder, Tippmann, MilSig and
especially the SAR-12 bolt action paintball sniper rifle, there is now such a thing
as a true paintball sniper, a shooter able
to deliver single accurate shots from concealed positions to eliminate opponents
at long range, and this change makes
the Ghillie Suit more useful to a serious
paintball player than ever before!
First used by Scottish game-keepers and
hunters to remain concealed from both
prey and poachers, then pressed into
military service and now used by snipers
and scouts to all but disappear into their
surroundings, a Ghillie Suit helps fool observing eyes by breaking up the human
silhouette. Using colored strips of rope
or yarn over a light camouflage base
and often augmented by pieces of foliage from the local surroundings, a Ghillie
Suit helps the wearer look like anything
but an opponent with a gun, allowing
a slow-moving or stationary shooter to
remain undetected – at least until they
fire and possibly even afterwards. Often
made by hand by individual snipers or
shooters to best suit their particular requirements, for paintball purposes commercially available Ghillie Suits like the
one sent to X3 by Miles Tactical and manufactured by GhillieSuits.com, are readily
available and work quite well to help an
aspiring sniper disappear.
Though hot once worn over paintball
clothing, the Ghillie Suit sent for review
was lightweight, easy to put on thanks
to its pants and hooded jacket configuration, and was relatively easy to move
around in. With the hood up over the
wearer’s head, a player willing to remain
still and find a good position from which
to shoot can all but disappear, making
identification by opponents near and far
very difficult. Serious paintball snipers
will add foliage and brush from their local
field to the suit, further helping them to
blend in.
Well-made, lightweight and very effective
at concealing the wearer, the Ghillie Suit
is now a serious part of modern tactical
and scenario paintball and anyone willing to put the time into learning how to
accurately shoot First Strike rounds and
use a Ghillie Suit to remain concealed
can live the dream of making that amazing one-shot hit that their opponent never saw coming!
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