Props Spartan Laser Metal & Fiberglass Airsoft Prop (Fully Functioning Electronic Replica)

[Seth Knight]

Hey just so you know your making Mr. Epic cry, just be because your Spartan laser even more epic than he is! I had a thought. Why not a paintball gun instead of an airsoft gun? The paintball would/could leave big red spot on your target granted you get red paintballs. Just a thought. Keep up the good *cough* I mean outstandingly awesome work!

 

[EJPK]

Looks great! After you're done can you post a video so we can see it in action?:confused

 

[Redshirt]

Hey just so you know your making Mr. Epic cry, just be because your Spartan laser even more epic than he is! I had a thought. Why not a paintball gun instead of an airsoft gun? The paintball would/could leave big red spot on your target granted you get red paintballs. Just a thought. Keep up the good *cough* I mean outstandingly awesome work!

Thanks. XxDrxNinjaxX asked the same question on 7/21. You could shoehorn in a paintball setup, but the end result would be just like a basic paintball gun, not extraordinary. With airsoft, I can get the equivalent of three guns inside. The red glow in the dark BBs will be flash charged as they get to the barrel as well as be backlit by a massive LED red tail light as they travel downrange. In a night game, it should look spectacular.

Looks great! After you're done can you post a video so we can see it in action?:confused

That is definitely part of the plan. I'll probably do several videos. In the near term, the electronics are coming along. When that's right in a week or two, I'll grab a video of the bench test of the electronics package all working. I can say that I've gotten all three mech boxes to fire at once. That was spectacular!

i call dibs

I will PM you when I intend to make it's first combat outing.

Redshirt

 

[hyundai2806]

wwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh...not enough O's to go around for this..there just isnt

 

[Seth Knight]

Now I take back the paintball idea, your plan is much better! Let no grunts survive! Mwahahaha! (keep up the good work!)

 

[nosaint]

Pure Awesomeness. Way to pick one of the hardest weapons and nail it! Damm dude, great work

 

[Redshirt]

Test Fitting

Another update with no actual progress, just taking time to see how everything goes together. In this set of pics, I've placed all the parts together to see how everything is going to look, as well as show just how big this thing is.

I've taken the other metal parts (foregrip, zombie smasher) and set them up in position on the lower receiver and fiberglass parts. It's good to get a glimpse of what the final product is going to look like.

Some fit issues. The forward part of the fiberglass upper receiver is not perfectly parallel to the back half. I'll have to cut, reshape, and re-fiberglass the narrowest point to get the metal and fiberglass to mate up perfectly.

There are a couple of spots where the fiberglass angles should match the angles in the metal, so I'll need to reprofile more of the fiberglass in those spots. It looks like it's nearing completion, but she's just a hollow shell with a lot of welding, machining, soldering and sanding still to go.

Trying to give some perspective on the size. You can see just how big this thing is--compared to a finski. It's just short of 39 inches in full scale.

Here it is compared to a modern combat weapon, my airsoft SCAR-L. The SCAR is a big heavy weapon, especially with the launcher and ACOG, yet it is dwarfed in size and weight by the Spartan Laser.


As I said in an earlier post, I've been working on the electronics package here and there. I'll cover that in my next update.

Redshirt

 

[Revenant1988]

The Splaser is only 39' in full scale? Wow I thought it was bigger than that. I'm working on a Covenant carbine and that particular weapon is 50' long in real life... crazy!

This is looking great Red, can't wait to see how you do the internals!

 

[Redshirt]

The Splaser is only 39' in full scale? Wow I thought it was bigger than that. I'm working on a Covenant carbine and that particular weapon is 50' long in real life... crazy!

This is looking great Red, can't wait to see how you do the internals!

Yep, all of the references show it just under 39 inches and 42 pounds. Unfortunately, I'll be a lot closer to the 42 pounds than I want to be. The Spartan Laser is massive, but not compared to things like the fuel rod gun or the brute shot. I look forward to seeing the carbine, it's one of my favorites. Internals are next.

Redshirt

 

[Mstruvmgc]

Wow this is spiffy! Lol

 

[Seneschal]

I'm not even a Halo buff, but this gets me excited...This is an amazing build, and it's obvious that you're putting a lot of thought, time, and energy into this--I'm sure all your hard work will pay off! Thanks for posting all of your in-prog and process photos for us to see!!

 

[DBmike]

Looks awesome dude

 

[Redshirt]

Electronics!

Here's a look at some of my electrical sub assemblies coming together. I've had my circuit plan locked down since before the construction really began, but here the components and the prototype boards come together. For a review, here is what I plan for my electronics to do (from my initial post):

Turn on the master circuit, light the side marker LEDs, and raise the top shroud via a servo when the front handgrip is extended. This should be interesting as the SPLASER is never shown in the game in its predeployment configuration. You only see this function for a millisecond when you pick it up or switch between weapons. I also plan to embed white LEDs inside the BB hopper and at the gear box feed nozzles to allow the use of glow in the dark tracer BBs.

Activate the sighting laser, start the low-frequency rumble motor, start a 4-second timer circuit and a 3-second timer circuit when the trigger is pressed.

Activate the high-frequency rumble motor at the expiration of the 3-second timer to give the operator a one second heads-up that the weapon is about to fire.

Activate three relays at the expiration of the 4-second timer to light the high-intensity red light in the outer barrel that back-lights the outgoing BBs and, finally, to allow the three 11.1V Li-poly batteries to start the three airsoft gear boxes to bring the pain!

Finally, my own cheat code: Pulling the trigger very hard will override the timers and bring an instant rain of BBs onto my opponent. After all, who really likes waiting 4 seconds for their SPLASER to fire when someone is shooting at you?

The above-mentioned rumble motors were gutted from a dead XBOX 360 controller and will help give the replica the same feedback you get from using the Spartan Laser in the game.
In addition to the above, I now plan to use a servo motor to charge the BB feed mechanisms.

Here are the three mechboxes and their batteries. The master battery is a 2200 mAH 11.1 Volt LiPoly. The slave systems are powered by smaller 1800 mAH 11.1 Volt LiPolys controlled by solenoids energized by the master system. The master system fires after the primary trigger switch has been held for four seconds or if the trigger is squeezed hard enough to trip the override trigger.

Lots of goodies in this shot. Here's the LED tail light and socket that's tied into the master solenoid. It comes on at 4 seconds to back light the BBs in red as they fly downrange to create a red beam effect. The sighting laser is also here. It's by UTG and is easily the brightest red laser I've seen in the $50 category. It's as bright as sighting lasers for real firearms costing hundreds more. You can see the two rumble motors bogarted out of a dead XBOX360 controller. The low frequency motor comes on as soon as the trigger is pressed. The high frequency motor comes on after the trigger has been pulled for 3 seconds to let the shooter the weapon is one second from firing.

Here are the brains of the operation, the project box. In the finished gun, this will reside just behind the mechboxes. This is my second go at soldering the prototype board. Electronics experts may find it difficult to believe that this solder job is a huge improvement over an earlier job. Inside the box you can see the three relays. The master relay is to the left. The blue item in the box is the micro transformer that generates the 5.1 Volt supply to drive the timer and side marker LEDs. For final assembly, the box will have grommets added to organize the wiring harnesses. At this stage, the final internal arrangements are not sorted, so I made the wires for every component extra long. Once every piece is located permanently, I'll shorten the wires to keep things tidy.

Hopefully the next update will include a demo of all the components working together.

Redshirt

 

[Octorock]

Nice start on electronics. Funny cheat, but.... In a match in which getting your gun shot renders it unusable, how do you hide this barn of a gun?

 

[Redshirt]

Nice start on electronics. Funny cheat, but.... In a match in which getting your gun shot renders it unusable, how do you hide this barn of a gun?

Gravity will do everything I need to hide this gun. After a short amount of play, I'll need to be real motivated to lift it up to where I can use it or the opponent can see it! My SCAR with EGLM, ACOG, and tac light gets to be a pain to drag around after while. I'm sure the even heavier Spartan Laser will be worse, and it doesn't have a sling. I'm more concerned with the side lighting giving me away in night games.

Redshirt

 

[Stiilus]

all i can say is wow. this is incredible. i look at all the crazy wires you've got going on there and i'm instantly confused, but seeing how the rest of this baby has come together i know it's going to be amazing. i'm almost tempted to go and build one myself now, but obviously without all the electronics. i can't wait to see it fully assembled .

 

[Croc co]

This doesn't even deserve to be in the noob forum, once it's finished it should be in the elite forums!

 

[Mstruvmgc]

The wires look like what happens to headphones after taking them out of your pocket lol.
Everything looks great

 

[thorn696]

Epic work of art
This is one of the most detailed works that I have seen yet. All the planning and hard work have truly paid off on this one, it just leaves wanting for more. That said I can't wait for the next update just to see what you do next. :cool

 

[Redshirt]

Live Action Bench Test Demo!

all i can say is wow. this is incredible. i look at all the crazy wires you've got going on there and i'm instantly confused, but seeing how the rest of this baby has come together i know it's going to be amazing. i'm almost tempted to go and build one myself now, but obviously without all the electronics. i can't wait to see it fully assembled .

Thanks. Here's the "Crazy" sorted out.

This doesn't even deserve to be in the noob forum, once it's finished it should be in the elite forums!

Thank you. It would be nice to do this over in Weapons and Props, it's kinda lost in here.

The wires look like what happens to headphones after taking them out of your pocket lol.
Everything looks great

I couldn't agree more. I was too cheap to buy multicolored wires to help segregate the various functions. What can I say, I'm a big fan of red and black.

Epic work of art
This is one of the most detailed works that I have seen yet. All the planning and hard work have truly paid off on this one, it just leaves wanting for more. That said I can't wait for the next update just to see what you do next. :cool

Thank you Thorn. Here's the live-action bench test:

It's great to see the three Echo1 gearboxes working together. There is so much going on with the electronics package that I figured the only way to help people get their brains around it was to just film a demo. I've still got a little cleanup to do, and the front shroud and winder circuits to build (small potatoes), but here is everything else all up and running, especially the timer circuits. Anyway, here's the bench test:

Sorry, Mike Rowe was unavailable to narrate.

Redshirt