L:
Hi, I'm luke. Today on Out of Darts, I've got my friend Tarik here. Tarik is one of the major
design contributors on the Out of Darts website. He's responsible for Jupiter and a number of other
projects on the site. Today we are going to show you a brand new platform called Little Rocket.
Little Rocket is the world's smallest 3D-printed blaster, and it is an extremely modular, versatile
platform. The Little Rocket platform starts with the handheld version of Little Rocket, and you can
see there's knurling here to hold this in your hand; comfortable to hold single-shot blaster.
But that's just step one. Step two is a rail-mounted version, a bottom mount,
that you can mount on the top of any blaster to add any ammo type to any blaster out there
you want. It's a Picatinny rail by default, but we also have adapters to adapt to an N-Strike rail or
a Rival rail. Now, in addition to the bottom one, we also have right and left mounts. And what this
means is you can mount it on the sides of your blasters and still have the trigger up. Or perhaps
you want to put it on the top of your blaster and have the trigger on the left or the right side.
So there are four main body styles giving you a huge range of options when you build
this blaster and put it on your existing blaster, or -- on the base model -- use it in your hand.
I did want to mention that this is really a family of products and a platform of products. Little
Rocket is the base model, which is the handheld variation, and then the mountable versions are
called Proud Papa. So with that naming scheme, you can tell that we are already thinking forward of
the next couple of designs. So you'll see more family members added in the future.
Little Rocket is a versatile platform that shoots a variety of ammo types.
It uses an innovative twist-lock barrel connection system that allows you to use a wide variety of
barrels. We've got barrels for elite, for short dart, for mega, for rival, for boomco... T:
(and ultra) L: ...and even for ultra. He made me say it. In addition to those ammo types, we've
also got a triple shot and an inline, three short dart shot, which can fire three in a row without
reloading. In addition to the eight barrel types, you also can use a few of these double-stacked.
The single dart barrel here can fire two at a time if you double-stack them,
and the triple can do the same as well. These barrels are really simple to
swap on and screw in place. There's an o-ring up front that makes for an excellent seal, and
it's a really fun little platform for a variety of ammo. One by-product of making these barrels
really quick to swap is that you can actually swap a barrel faster than you could reload a dart. So
it would be possible to just have a whole dump pouch of these barrels and really quickly
swap them in, fire, put them in a used pouch, and continue firing. L:
Ah, you hit me(!)
T: Past the customization of the barrel, you can customize a trigger. Starting off with the
most basic one, which is a stick. This is very comfortable to hold in-hand, but it's also nice
when you want to hit it from the side. The other types are thumb-based, so this is a nice groove
for you to fit your thumb in, or if you wanted a higher surface to smack on, you've got a smash
one. And lastly, this one is a cord-based one if you want to pull the trigger at a different
location. We have three options for priming the blaster. The first one is a ring for a single-hand
pull. The second one is an anchor. For those that want a little bit stronger [gip] to pull,
it's a little bit easier -- especially on top of blasters and other devices. And lastly, we got
the paracord, which is the easiest to prime and the smallest profile. L: Tarik also designed two
really cool arm mounts. This first one is a static mount, where you can mount Little Rocket on top
and that straps onto your wrist. And the second one, which is my personal favorite,
is a sliding arm mount. We've got options of a single Picatinny, a long Picatinny, or a dual. So
in the case of the dual, you would replace this here, and you can actually mount two opposing
Little Rockets. So you can whip this blaster in your hand, and you've got two shots,
and it kind of is your ultimate last resort. It's worth noting that these are a modular approach,
so these could be used with any other blaster, and they're going to be a standalone product
in addition to being compatible with the Little Rocket. Now I want to talk about something that's
probably on your mind, and that's the performance. T: Now, to start off, let's give a reference. So a
Jolt usually gets 55 fps for elite darts. Compared to what we have with this, which is 90 fps for
elites and 105 for short darts. L: And Tarik did an incredible amount of testing, and redesign,
and endless chronograph readings. The performance readings you're seeing on the screen are a 20-shot
average. And another thing that's worth mentioning is that the standard deviation on this blaster
is very low due to the shorter barrel type and a lot of power coming into the system.
We're going to be offering two different springs with this blaster. The numbers you saw on the
screen are, of course, the highest-power spring. But we know that there are younger users that also
might have a lot of fun with this blaster, and so we are going to offer a lower-powered spring.
And sometimes the lower-power spring is also better if you're going to hand-hold because
you don't have as much grip versus when you've got this on a blaster, you've got a lot more leverage
to really easily prime the blaster. That brings me to our next point, which is some of the more
interesting use-cases. T: So one of my favorites is when you're putting on any small handy blasters
like this. Especially ones that have a [top] prime, this will actually help you prime
both blasters at the same time. So now you can fire both pipes if you want, and also it doesn't
prevent you from reloading. L: The Roundhouse is another great blaster that could benefit from this
priming method. Basically, anything that's got a rail up here, whether it's Picatinny, N-Strike,
or Rival, is compatible because we've got different adapters for everything that's not
a Picatinny. One of my favorite use cases is the Rapid Strike because the Rapid Strike is nothing
but rails. Here I've got it set up with a mega mounted upfront, so this both becomes my foregrip,
and it actually has a purpose now. I've got the lanyard pull here so I can prime
and fire. And if I want to swap out a new barrel, like with another mega, I can prime and fire.
It's a really sweet little setup. And again, of course, you can swap out all of your different
barrel types and ammo types to meet your actual game method. T: So my other favorite use-case,
and I am slightly biased, is on a Jupiter. So I know a lot of people talk about how the
fact with Jupiter when you run out of ammo, you have no way to defend yourself. Now you have a
solution. Right here, we got a triple on top, so after you're empty, you're completely out of ammo.
Everybody thinks you're out, you're reloading, you're like, "Nope!" Boom! Take them out. T:
So we talked about using Little Rocket with blasters, but with SAM and AM,
there's a lot of possibilities too. For AM, our arm mount, one use-case is you can put on the same
hand that you have your blaster on. So not only can you fire, but then quickly use your hidden
blaster for taking out people that are expecting you to reload. SAM has couple of use-cases:
One is you can do gravity-fed, swing your arm out to get blasters into your hand. Or you can even
use a string-powered method to get into your hand. And lastly, you can put two blasters on there,
as we talked about, two Little Rockets swing into your hand. And then have two different
shots or different ammo types. You can have mega and triple, whatever you would like on
that blaster. L: I love that one. It reminds me of Assassin's Creed, which I'm sure a lot of people
are gonna put in the comments. I wanted to talk a little bit about the design history on this,
because this project has been a long time in the making. It started with
Tark approaching me, i think over four years ago, at a NobaCon game with this contraption, which was
an existing slide mount, and two minimized Jolts to get the same concept that he's now 3D printed.
And a lot of hard work and effort has gone into the evolution of this, so i wanted him to kind of
take it off. T: Yeah, so this idea all came around about five years ago when i saw something called
a Micro Jolt. So you take a regular Jolt and you minimize it. And then I was really obsessed about
Assassin's Creed back then, and so somebody actually posted a picture of creating the
gun pistol on Assassin's Creed. So I ended up replicating the same thing here, you can see.
And from then on, I saw something called the SpyNet, which is this little toy that allows
you to slip into your hands, and i was like, "You know what? We can put two Micro Jolts
on there(!)" So you can see it here. And you know as I was cleaning my shop in recent times,
I realized these were broken. I wanted to remake it, but the process is such a pain to do you know
minimized Jolt. So i was like, "Wait. I know how to 3D print. I've been doing this for a while.
Can I make a 3D-printed version, so that way it's really easy to reproduce?" So I started something
with like this, and you can see this is quite big bulky version. The first prototype was like this.
We used a different type of tubing internally, and this was screw-on.
My like for puzzles actually kind of gave me an idea how to do a different type of locking
mechanism so I had this idea of these prongs which is used for puzzle-solving like maze-type
puzzles. So I took that idea and I extended it. I was like, "Can I make it work for the purposes of
a quick barrel change?" And so I did that. The idea worked out, but then there was an air seal
problem so I solved that issue by like, "Oh, if I put an o-ring, which is what they're designed for,
I can get this, and it gives me a nice little clip on. So from then on, I kept moving around, moving
towards replacing it. So this is actually Luke's idea he's the one who thought of it. I was like,
"This tubing is too big, because the material is quite fat. So can we do something different?" and
he's like, "Oh, we have the rival tubing that we use constantly." And so you had the idea. I
was like, "Okay, let's go try out the idea," and we just kept iterating and making improvements.
Then we started creating different body parts. So this is left, right, and even bottom. And then we
did many testing to reduce the size and scale of this, so making the neck a little bit shorter,
making the blaster a little bit longer so you get more power out of it, and even messing with
letterings to see what kind of best lettering fits -- ones that go outwards or ones that go inwards,
such as these two. L: So you can see here there's just been a lot of development and
iteration and improvement, and it's been a very long process and it's been really enjoyable to
be the one just sort of giving feedback and guiding the project a little bit, and just letting
Tarik kind of do his thing. There's never enough time to design everything, which is why we're such
a great partnership. Because I could not possibly have invested all the time that something like
this would have taken, on top of all the other business aspects, and finalizing the proton pack,
and everything else. On that note, the testing process for this was absolutely extensive.
Being a computer scientist, Tarik is pretty into data, so he and his fiancee Bri did a ton of work
in collecting all of the different data sets for different barrel types, different seals, different
ammo types, to get us all the data to create the best possible product in the end. T: Every test
we did we ran with 20 shots that are executed and then each blaster was fired more than thousands
of times, and this is all done by Bri. She is an amazing person that managed to do every kind of
A/B testing possible to make sure every barrel was tuned to the maximum possible fps that we can get
out of it. After we did all that, we actually then send it out to two waves of beta testers,
testing out to see what the comfort was how easy it is to use, how easy it is to assemble. Feedback
is an instrumental aspect of design. So from the beta users you can see one visual representation:
They had an issue priming this, so I made it even easier by adding these ridges for your
hands to nicely fit within there. L: The assembly process for this blaster is remarkably simple.
It's really easy to put together. It's a few basic steps and we've got a full build tutorial that
shows you step-by-step how to put this together. Now if you don't want to build it, we also have
a check box at checkout where we can build this for you, so you can receive this product
fully-assembled, which marks, actually really, the first product on our shop that is available,
fully-assembled, all the time. I also wanted to say that we've heard you. Our customers
have frequently told us that we could do better documentation, and we are working towards that.
And in that light, in addition to the build video Tarik and Bri also created a really extensive
pdf that you can download to build these, and that's got some really great renders along with
instructions, and even hand illustrations that Bri did to show you how to build the product.
Moving forward, I'm really hoping that we can do these style build guides for all future products,
but they are a serious time investment, so I'm really excited to see what you think of them
and whether you prefer the video version or if you like looking at the nice printed pdf.
Finally, I wanted to talk about price, which I'm sure is a question many of you have been
wondering. The price point on these blasters is going to start around $25, and that includes
two barrels. One of the great things about working with Tarik is that he comes with some bonus perks.
And he's a computer scientist and knows quite a bit about web design, so he's been doing a lot
of back-end code for the website. So for this product, we were able to go totally crazy on
the number of features and 23 plus colors. And so you'll see here on the screen we've got just
a really awesome color picker which allows you to pick out the colors, pick out the options,
and it will reprice everything according to what you've selected. We've got 23 colors for the main
body and the bottom plates, and six colors for the other accents. We did this to limit the quantity
of bins that happens at the warehouse because the amount of space this has started to take up with
all of the color variants is staggering. It's currently about... T: 244 bins. L: ...244 bins
in a 10 or 11-foot workbench up and down Tarik and I are really excited to finally get Little Rocket
launched. he's been working on this for ages, and I've been giving feedback, but it's one of those
projects that has really stretched out a very very long time. So finally seeing it come to fruition
and hit the web store is a really big deal for us. This little family that we've developed,
the Little Rocket, and the Proud Papa being the mountable one, is definitely a family and we have
more coming. I'm not going to tell you anything about those right now, but I would love to hear
from you: What other family members would you like to see, and what use-cases are your favorite?
Where would you put this on your blaster? Let me know in the comments, and we're going to give away
two of these with the launch. A week after the video airs we'll use a random comment selector to
give away two of these free and in your choice of colors.
Thank you so much for watching. If you're not subscribed already, please do.
And hit that like button. it helps out the channel tremendously. Until next time, I'm out of darts.