Proper Hopup Adjustment

[Icepick]

This one seems like a no-brainer, but what exactly is proper hopup adjustment? After blowing the dust off of my fishgun and putting a few rounds through it, I simply got curious.



Being the fantastic artist that I am, I provided some of my work to be critiqued. /sarcasm

The meaning of this picture is to ask you guys which of these is the proper way to adjust the hopup. You can see flight path A in which the BB follows a straight path until it's descent (this will occur up until a certain adjustment of the hopup.) As for diagram B - I'm not going to try and guess at the exact science behind it, but I'm sure you've seen this flight path in your own replica quite a few times. It seems that with flight path B the BB goes farther out of my fish, but just to be sure I wanted to ask for some input on what you guys do with your hopups. I've been going with flight path A for quite a while now, but if B is the true way to do it, then I'll go with that from now on.

[Payback]

I do B on everything i have.

You get easily an extra 50ft out of each shot. Sometimes you need it to be less lift than others, but i always have some lift to it.

[Nodachi]

Generally I follow the Fortress method which basically looks like this:


I think it's a good guideline to follow, in that you basically zero it so that you can hit at medium and longer ranges with equal effect (even if your longer range shots tend to go towards the feet.)

[Switchback]

I've never seen the flight path of a bb from an oblique angle like that, I'm thinking someone should film a tracer at night to showcase these different patterns:)

I prefer to use what you called "A" because the flight path is more predictable. Also, the velocity your bb will have in that extra 50 feet is probably pretty weak, you might as well "arc and lob" in my opinion. If you've got an optic, option "b" will likely frustrate the hell out of you!

[Icepick]

I've never seen the flight path of a bb from an oblique angle like that, I'm thinking someone should film a tracer at night to showcase these different patterns:)

Skip to about 3:00 and get ready to enjoy yourself! My diagram is pretty crappy, Nodachi's fortress method picture is a more accurate representation of what I was trying to describe.

Thank you all for the input. I took a visit to AONW and got some BBs and a new bucking, I'll toy around with my hopup and edit my findings into this post.

EDIT: After shooting a few magazines, I found that the best results for me were to use the fortress method (B in my diagram) but adjusting it so that the curvature is as small as possible. Once I went too high into the fortress method, the BBs got extra range but also lost a lot of velocity towards their descent. With the method (A in my diagram) I previously used, the range was limited but the BBs had a higher velocity towards the end of their descent. Using the fortress method with minimal curvature gave me a little bit more range without too much of a loss in velocity near the end of the BB's flight path.

One interesting thing to note (though it was probably just with my replica) is the fact that the spread of BBs in full auto increased with the fortress method.