How to Make Yourself Disappear: Create Proper Concealment
As an airsofter who plays using both snipers and DMR’s, I have found that using correct camouflage, ghillies and gun wraps can change my play style dramatically. Lately I have become very familiar with using ghillies and gun wraps to find the best ways to conceal both myself and my rifle. My number one rule when it comes to making ghillie or gun wraps is always do my research on the local environment to understand what colour ghillie suit or wrap to use, ranging anywhere from lush to arid colour schemes. Materials you may want to use when creating your ghillie would be camouflage netting, artificial plants and vegetation, and ghillie strands, plus a little bit of natural vegetation. Once all of your materials are ready, you want to start piecing your ghillie suit together by either tying knots, zip tying, or using elastic bands to attach your ghillie materials. Your base can be a viper hood, fish netting, or pre-made ghillie netting. Once you’ve found the right colours that blend in to the natural environment, then you can assemble your suit and wrap. When piecing your suit and wrap together, it is very important to mask the shape of your body and your paintball or airsoft gun silhouette. The reason you want to mask the shapes and outlines of yourself and your rifle is because silhouettes are one of the most common things to give yourself away when hiding.
The shapes and outlines in particular you want to hide with your ghillie and wrap are from your torso up, optics as well as the barrel of your rifle. You want to hide from your torso and up because once you camouflage the natural silhouette of your upper body, it is much harder to be seen, especially when the people you are playing with are specifically looking for the shape of a human body. Another reason you hide your optics is that large square or circular optics don’t naturally blend in with the natural environment. If you look around most environments, you will almost never find a perfect circle.
Adding a black kill flash to your rifle never hurts either. You hide the barrel of your rifle because during a match when your team is under fire and is unsure of where the shots are coming from, what is the most common thing people are look for? Most people would answer that they look for a trail of BBs followed by the barrel and sound of the rifle. The best way to conceal your optics and barrel is to drape camouflage netting, artificial plants, gillie stands or natural vegetation over the area of the gun. It never hurts to use all of those materials together. When piecing the wrap together, just as with the ghillie suit, you will want to tie knots, zip tie, or use elastic bands to attach the camouflage to your gun
Now that you have the basics for our ghillie and gun wrap, always make sure your design matches on both items, as you don’t want a semi-arid colour ghillie with a very lush colour gun. Always add a little bit of natural vegetation to both your ghillie suit and gun wrap to really blend in to the local environment.
One of the more important additions to having a good ghillie and wrap is to make sure you have a rifle that is relatively silent. For airsofters using a spring-powered bolt action airsoft rifle, it can be as easy as adding a hollow suppressor to your gun to block some of the air exiting the rifle. For more sound suppression, you can always add a suppressor with baffling on the inside. Players using gas-powered or HPA rifles should use a suppressor with baffles to funnel and spread out the gasses and air exiting the rifle. Last but not least, players using AEG’s will want to add a thick sorbo pad to the gun as well as a suppressor to block some of the exiting air. Having a gun that is relatively silent means you can conceal your position a bit more effectively.
As a last note, make sure to understand that just because you now have proper concealment, that doesn’t mean you will always be invisible to the enemy player. You still need to make sure to be aware of your surroundings to properly position yourself and choose the right and wrong time is to move positions.
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