Hey, it's Luke with Out of Darts.
Today, we are launching a brand-new, rival, flywheel-powered blaster.
Every king needs a queen.
This is Juno.
Let's get going!
This is the Out of Darts Juno.
Now, let me get this out of the way.:
This is obviously a product on our shop.
So, while this isn't a sponsored video, this is a product video at the end of the day.
You should be familiar with this by now.
You'll find a link in the description, the pinned comment, and hopefully (if we've got
YouTube shopping figured out) the little shelf down below the video as well.
This type of Blaster has a little bit of pedigree and also a soft spot in my heart because it's
really what got me going in the hobby.
My whole modding journey and everything in this shop started with the HIR-ricane.
When I got this blaster initially, one of the very first things I did to it was simply
jam a long piece of PVC and let gravity feed balls through the flywheels as fast as possible,
which was infinitely hilarious.
I then built this version of The Blaster, which is really the genesis of the shop.
In addition to testing these tube versions, I also just used a washing machine hose, which
ultimately got used in the proton pack.
A little more on that at the end of the video as well.
Enter 3D printing.
This original prototype, to me now, is pretty laughable.
This was me knowing nothing about CAD and painfully putting something together in TinkerCAD.
These designs got a little more refined over time, and I played with different configurations.
Eventually, we got proper switches and ultimately worked with Tarik to develop the actual first
Jupiter that we launched over five years ago.
Despite Jupiter being a tremendously popular product, there were always a lot of things
we wanted to change about it.
The first being that there was a lot of waste because of how this was printed.
The front two shells and the grip halves have a ton of support.
It takes a lot of cleanup and a lot of extra effort, and they're a little finicky to print.
Additionally, it's a pretty blocky design, and we've learned so much in the past five
years since putting this together; Tarik especially has really grown by leaps and bounds when
it comes to designing Blasters.
The next big issue was the toy screws.
It's easily the number one complaint of this blaster.
When you put toy screws into plastic and thread them into plastic, they really don't allow
you to thread them over and over, and it's just not a long-term reliable product.
Additionally, we had an issue in Fusion 360 where our original Jupiter files are essentially
completely broken.
We cannot get them recovered or repaired to function properly, and the blaster would essentially
need to be completely redesigned just to make any changes whatsoever.
At this point, Tarik and I decided, “Let's make a new version of this blaster.”
It's been popular.
We love it.
We like playing with it.
It always brings joy to people's faces when they dump that magazine.
And that's where we got to Juno.
Since we were going to start from scratch anyway,
It gave us the opportunity to ask you, our loyal viewers, fans, and customers, what you
wanted most in a rival blaster.
This was a really interesting poll that we put up, and you'll see the results on-screen
of the ranking of order of priority, what people thought was most important and least
important.
So, we ultimately focused on your input on that poll to determine our final design.
This is Juno.
Juno is a compact rival magazine-fed Blaster.
It shoots standard rival balls through a rival magazine.
It's compatible with a wide range of magazines, including some of the oddball magazines, The
7-Rounders, the 12-Rounders,
And most importantly, it's also compatible with Worker's rival 15-round mags.
Now, this was especially exciting because these are insanely durable.
They're really thick-walled, and they hold 15 rounds, so you get that extra bit of capacity.
The lack of magazines has been a really sore point for the shop because, ultimately, we
weren't able to sell these, and a lot of the knockoffs and third-party ones were really
poor quality, and we didn't feel good carrying them on the shop.
Additionally, there have been so many different variations on the mag release and how it catches
that, and that has caused issues as well.
Our solution there was ultimately to catch in the blaster on a different point on these
notches rather than further back, and that's made it compatible with all of the existing
rival mags that are out there.
One of the biggest changes we've made to Juno is creating brand new custom CNC-Lathed Flywheels.
These flywheels feature heavy concavity and serrations for a better grip on the ball.
Because of the new wheels, we've been able to improve the performance all the way up
to about 130 FPS.
What we ultimately learned in our testing is that when firing the rival balls at higher
velocities, there were diminishing returns in range.
Interestingly enough, the difference between 150 and 200 FPS was only about eight feet
of actual travel distance.
And the difference between about 130 FPS and 150 FPS is also only about ten feet.
The returns are really diminishing from that point.
Whereas, when you're looking at 100 FPS to 130 FPS, you're actually gaining a good 20-25
feet or so, depending on conditions.
The Blaster is full auto, and we will have a variety of pushers.
Inside this, we've got a 1,000 RPM motor, which is about 15 rounds per second (maybe
a hair more).
That's probably about the top I would put on here; maybe 18 rounds per second is the
top.
If you go any farther, you ultimately bog down the flywheels quite a bit; they don't
have time to spin back up.
With Juno, we've gone with a single trigger, but we may also have a rev trigger available
if you're interested in that method.
Another big problem we had with Jupiter was that anybody who was inexperienced with a
rev trigger could easily jam the blaster and overwhelm the flywheels, causing a complete
failure in the system.
Because you cannot fire without revving first because of the two-stage trigger, this has
somewhat alleviated that issue.
In the back here, you will notice there is a thumb screw.
We're going to include a thumb screw on every blaster because it's just a better solution
overall.
And you've got a very large --
And you've got a very large battery capacity up top.
The blaster is a little larger overall, but we really wanted to accommodate an easy-to-access
battery compartment with more space for a variety of battery types, meaning customers
can reuse the existing 3S batteries they have.
We really wanted to focus on printability with this blaster and making all of these
parts use as little or no support as possible.
Additionally, on the sides, you'll see there are rails.
You've got an option to do rail mounts, HOLDster plate mounts, magnetic mounts, or to have
them completely flat and not there at all.
On the note of design and files, I think you will all be really excited that we are trying
something different with Juno.
These will be available in hardware kit, 3D printed kit, and fully-assembled.
You did hear me right:
You will be able to download these files, print them yourself, build them yourself,
and do what you see fit with them -- Provided it's for noncommercial use only, of course.
We have gone back and forth on the open-source sort of method and in giving files out, and
there were a lot of problems there.
One of the biggest ones was print tolerance.
When we released the initial Jupiter, print tolerances in your prints were pretty finicky
and had to be exactly right.
Here, we've got a little bit more room for forgiveness.
Simultaneously, the printing world and the quality of 3D printers has gotten better and
better.
So, we are more confident that customers are going to be able to print these on their own
and successfully put them together.
We will have these files available on the listing as well as on GitHub as user OUTOFDARTSSHOP.
There, you can give us feedback, leave notes, and download the prints and parts for yourself.
We will be making changes and updates as time goes on to improve the parts based on your
feedback and our team's feedback, and we can't wait to see what you all do with them.
So, we will have hardware kits available right off the bat.
So, you can buy the hardware that's got all the screws, the thumb screw, wire, the flywheels,
the motors, all of that ready to go and get printing.
Now, let's have some goofy fun.
So, I’ve gone ahead and removed this.
But by removing just the thumb screw and two M3 screws here that go into brass inserts,
We can then take our Proton Pack and plug it back in.
So yes, this blaster is compatible with existing proton packs.
You simply take your adapter…
There's a pass-through hole on a different rear end here.
Again, these will be available in the files.
You plug that in, put your battery door back on and reassemble.
At that point, the blaster has no battery, and we are transferring power over to the
proton pack.
And then we can get it going.
I never get tired of that.
It's just too much fun.
I've actually stopped playing with this proton pack because it's such a different style of
play.
You don't have that frantic-ness of reloading magazines, and I kind of like that adrenaline
rush of, “Ah!
I’ve got to top off my magazine.”
But there's nothing that beats the proton pack for humans versus zombies.
So, of course, the blaster will be compatible right out of the box with the proton pack.
And I know a bunch of you are now asking, “When is the proton pack going to be back
in stock?”
We're looking at Q1 2024.
I finally have a new engineer that's going to redesign the boards for parts that are
actually available.
It's been a supply chain nightmare.
Believe me, it hurts me more than it hurts you guys.
I really have wanted that on the shop.
We have enough parts in the warehouse, minus the boards, to do another 500+ units that
have just been sitting there for a year and a half or two years.
It's honestly painful as a business owner to see, but I’ll be excited to get that
back out next year as well.
This blaster has been a long time in the making.
Any time we do something on the shop, we really want to make sure that we get it right as
far as printability, reliability, and testing.
We can't wait to get these out to you, but I have just one more thing.
This is Juno's fury.
Now, this blaster has a couple of different inspirations.
First, the most obvious is just the HIR-ricane in the way that I started.
This is also the Sylphrena, which is a ball-fed into Flywheels prototype that I did years
ago.
Another creator on YouTube, Andrew Atchinson, came up with a rough idea of this, which is
just a tube to an air-fed mag, very similar to the very first Zeus that I modeled with
this exact tubing.
So, we put this together as well.
This is a prototype, so this will be out in another month or so after we clean up how
it works and where the loading door is.
But down below, we've got a little EDF fan that we will 3D print and a little fan cover
there.
And then, in the base of the blaster, in the handle, is an XT-30 connector.
That's a pass-through connector to power this off of the rev switch.
And essentially, what you've got at that point is whatever length of tubing you want to add
up to a certain length acts like a mini proton pack,
I think this has about a 40-round capacity as it sits right here, plus or minus.
We're still working out the ideal length and the fan profile, so this isn’t optimized;
feeding is not perfect yet.
But we are going to get there.
We know the design works; it just needs a few tweaks.
That went way too quick!
I think we'll probably relocate the loading door from up here to down here because right
now, it is causing a little bit of congestion, but we wanted to show this off as a little
prototype in my personal preference of colors right now.
I think it's a really fun blaster, and I could see it just as a scavenger loadout; this is
just super fun.
You could make the hose a little shorter, and it could fit in front of your arm, or
you could let it go in back.
I think it opens up a lot of unique capabilities, and it's pretty easy to add on or take away.
It's just the proton pack back, essentially, and this base part, which can be replaced
with a plug.
Very, very fun.
On the note of Andrew, we probably have one of his blasters coming next year as well.
We're pretty excited about that.
So, more on that at a later date.
Thank you so much for watching and for checking out Juno!
We are so excited to finally get this out, and we would love to hear your thoughts in
the comments.
Would you like to print one?
Thanks for watching!
And, until next time, I'm out of darts.
…Today, we are launching a brand-new rival, Flywheel Blaster.
Every king needs a queen.
--
Can't load the mag backwards!