[Shockwave]

I noticed that the Etha has a pretty cool 2-stage bolt speed system.

I understand that a great deal of barrel breaks are caused by a bolt moving too fast and either "slapping" a ball that is positioned a tiny bit off of the face of the bolt, or simply accelerating the ball too fast.

Is this the exact purpose of the 2-stage bolt speed system? As far as I know, I don't think that the Ego or Geo have something like this implemented (correct me if I'm wrong). I'm curious as to if Jack could enlighten us as to the fragile paint handling behaviour (I spelled it British just for you) of the Etha when compared to the Ego and Geo.

I don't think that the Etha would necessarily replace a high end main gun for many players, but having a cheap gun as a backup for ultra brittle paint would give me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

[Uziel Gal]

Not so much the two stage acceleration, but the Geo Soft Touch kit (upgrade for the Geo, stock in the Geo+ and incorporated in to the Geo2 bolt kit), among several advantages, slowed the bolt acceleration, making the marker handle fragile paint better.

With regards to the Ego, newer models with the Zick rammer as standard, or those that can accept it as an upgrade, do have a two stage rammer/bolt acceleration. Most of the air in the rammer cap is expelled when the rammer reaches the end of it's movement. The o-ring around the inside of the rammer seals against the Zick extension of the rammer. As the rammer accelerates forwards, this seal creates some degree of vacuum, which tries to pull the rammer back, slowing it down. Once the Zick extension moves passed the rammer cap, the vacuum is broken, and the rammer and bolt are free to accelerate unrestricted. So you have an initial slow acceleration, then after the rammer and bolt have moved forwards a short distance, they can accelerate freely.

[Jack Wood]

Spring return bolt systems generally have a very high initial bolt speed. At the time the bolt starts moving and picks up the ball to push it into the barrel they can be very, er, destructive, shall we say.

With the Etha we implemented a 2-stage bolt acceleration profile so that initial bolt force is considerably reduced as well as adding the solt tip to the bolt.

The people who can give you the best feeback/input about this would be the guys who have been using them with tourney grade paint. If you look in THIS thread there are some reviews from players that have shot all kinds of brittle paint through their Ethas.

[Shecki]

Several cases of Ultra Evil at World Cup, and no issues here.