Gel blasters, also known as gel guns, gel shooters, gel markers, hydro markers or gelsoft, are toy guns similar in design to airsoft guns, but it shoots diameter superabsorbent polymer water beads as projectiles, which are often sold commercially as garden moisture retainers. Gel blasters are often played in CQB-style shooting skirmishes similar to paintball by squads or local clubs of enthusiasts often referred to as "gelballers", but follows an airsoft-like honor-based gameplay umpiring system. MilSim games involving players wearing camouflage and dump pouches are very popular, while "SpeedGel" players are more casual with team jerseys and often wear paintball masks. In addition to safety gear such as eye protections, the sport is heavily regulated on the field and players must adhere to safety rules.
Design
The general design of gel blasters are very similar to airsoft guns, usually comprising a coil spring-loaded pistonair pump, with a T-piece ahead of the pump outlet to feed gel beads. The spring-piston pump is either manually cocked or more commonly driven by an electric motor-gearbox assembly powered by batteries. However, unlike the plastic airsoft pellets or the gelatin paintball capsules, the gel beads are very frangible and will simply fragment if any high pressure is introduced, so the propelling pump is small with a very low pressure output. As a result, gel blasters have a much lower muzzle energy, and hence shorter effective range and worse accuracy than most paintball guns, although recently muzzle-mounted frictional "hop-up" devices have been introduced to impart backspin on the gel beads and try increasing the range and precision. This nature of the beads' external and terminal ballistics make them much safer to play with and very unlikely to cause any property damage. The gel beads are also very cheap, easily transported in packets and only require soaking in water for a few hours prior to playing. Another feature is the ease of cleaning, since the gel beads are made up by water in over 98% of mass and volume, and will break upon impact and simply dehydrate into tiny biodegradableslush powder fragments afterwards. Originally, gel blasters used paintball-style top-mounted hoppers that relied on gravity to load the gel beads when shooting, because the water beads were typically too fragile to withstand even the pressure exerted by a follower spring. However, in late 2016, bottom-mounted magazines with inbuilt motors were introduced, which draw power from the main batteries to drive a cogwheel that gently pushed the beads up a feeding tube. This gave a lot more realism than previously and triggered a huge surge in the popularity and market of gel blasters. The recent proliferation of more hardy gel beads on the market has also introduced magazines using the traditional spring follower.
Gas blowback blasters
In early 2020, "Kublai P1", a gas-powered version modelled after the Glock pistol, started to appear on the market. The P1 is essentially the same in design to gas blowback airsoft pistols, and uses refrigerant gas or propane to charge a gas canister built within a spring-follower magazine. The original version is fully polymer, but an upgraded version with metal slide and barrel is available for sale in Australia. In March 2020, a gel blaster version of the M203 grenade launcher is introduced to the Chinese market by MAX SUN, which is designed to mount on the underside of another gel blaster's handguard via a Picatinny rail interface. It uses a rechargeable aluminium gas canister shaped like a 40 mm grenade, whose cap portion has six tubular holes each capable of holding numerous 7mm gel balls. Instead of actually launching the "grenade", the launcher actually functions like a shotgun. When the trigger is pulled, the launcher's spring-loaded hammer strikes a valve at the center of the "grenade" base and allows the canister's stored gas to be released through its cap holes, propelling and spraying out a shower of gel balls towards the target. Another Chinese company called LDT also introduced a similar "grenade launcher" in the shape of the Milkor MGL, which uses a mainspring-driven revolver-like mechanism that needs to be manually wound before use, and can hold a total of six canistes for repeated discharges.
First introduced in China as an airsoft substitute and as a better alternative to foam dart guns, gel blasters have become increasingly popular in regions with airsoft-unfriendly laws such as Malaysia, Vietnam, and particularly Australia, where they quickly gained a massive enthusiast following in states like Queensland and South Australia. As the gel beads are not legally regarded as ammunitions, gel blasters are classified as toys by the ACCC ASN/NZ 8124 in Australia and are legal for sale, but they are a grey area in other states with so-called "appearance law" and are frequently subjected to arbitrary crackdowns by police. Some toy importers/merchants, such as Brad Towner from Armored Heaven in New South Wales and Peter Clarke from Tactical Edge in Queensland, have been subjected to shipment seizures by the Australian Border Force and prosecuted for "firearm offences" but had the lawsuits ruled in their favor. DJI's popular remote controlled toy ground drone, the RoboMaster S1, was almost banned from import into Australia because it had a blaster gun for competitive tag matches, and as of early 2020 is still not available for sale in Victoria and New South Wales in order "to comply with local laws and regulations".
