You have seen the rifled barrels inside real guns and are asking yourself whether they can be found inside airsoft replicas as well, this is a interesting question because they would work and numerous historical guns used rifled barrels and as a matter of fact most of old muskets and similar guns did not perform well before discovery of the rifled barrels. Rifled barrels greatly increased the accuracy of old guns and meant the revolution for the modern weaponry.
Airsoft guns generally do not have rifled barrels because they use hop up system, however there have been registered rifled barrels in the history of airsoft. Tokyo Marui vsr-10 is a great example of a rifled barrel airsoft gun that actually works quite well.
Tokyo Marui vsr-10 has something called „hop twist barrel“ which is basically same as the rifled barrels on real guns, the principle it follows is pretty much the same.
I will explain you a thing or two about rifled barrels and their interaction with airsoft guns.
If you are interested to know more about how far and accurate can airsoft guns shoot, check my post where I describe each gun type.
How does rifling increase the accuracy?
We know that rifled barrels perform great because they increase the accuracy on a gun, but how does it do it? The misconception is that BB benefits from the rotation itself that the twist inner barrel promotes, the BB affected by the spinning motion is not what leads to accuracy and the BB, due to its spherical shape can not utilize the twist design of the barrel like the real bullets can, so there is a difference in concept between a rifle barrel on real guns and on airsoft replicas.
What really happens is that the twist inner barrel creates a cyclone of air around the BB, thus generating enough force that helps the BB to safely flow through the inner barrel without touching the side walls of the inner barrel. This way the bouncing of a BB is greatly reduced because the BB is controlled by the produced air and this leads to improved accuracy and eventually to the better effective range of a gun.
The real guns however, use this rifling system completely differently. A bullet is aerodynamically shaped and benefits from the rotation itself, when the bullet is projected it continues being trapped inside the barrel until the moment it leaves the barrel, there is not a single moment when it bounces off the sides of the inner barrel.
Before this system was discovered the old guns would use the black powder balls that would constantly bounce off the sides of the inner barrel from the moment they were propelled to the moment they were expelled. This is the reason behind why those old guns were usually effective only at 20-30 feet and would hit targets randomly at any greater distance.
Why are rifled barrels rarely used on airsoft guns?
This certainly works and have been proven, however there are other reasons why this is not implemented in the most of airsoft guns currently on the market, like the hop up existence and because the airsoft BB has the spherical shape, a real bullet benefits far better due to the aerodynamics.
Another misconception is that you can not have both the hop up and the rifled barrel on the airsoft gun, it could go with one another but there are not enough advantages for such guns to be manufactured.
The rifled barrels also do not perform well on higher velocity airsoft guns, pretty much everything far over 300 FPS would not work as intended. Such higher velocity guns would actually lose the accuracy and thus have less effective range.
Another probable reason are the manufacturing expenses that do not have a positive return on investments, I am not a manufacturer and do not know much about it, but I could assume that rifled barrels would cost more. If you have something that underperforms already, why would you continue to manufacture guns with that system any longer?
There are a few guns that used this system purely because the manufacturers need to try new things and test it on the market, once the time passes they acquire the data and then make a plan where they decide whether they should continue to design guns using the tested model or not, in this case people did not like it.
The hop up already does a great job
I have explained the concept of rifling and there are more airsoft guns beside Tokyo Marui that use this concept, however most of airsoft replicas do not use it and they instead rely on the hop up system. Why is Hop up system so effective that most manufactures choose it?
Hop up creates a backspin on a fired BB by forcing the spherical BB object to adapt to the curved trajectory rather than following the straight line, simply making the job done.
They are easy to make, adjustable and most importantly, this system has passed multiple generations of airsoft replicas successfully and people liked it. Unless the shape of BB changes I believe that nothing will replace the good old hop up system.
The rifled barrel would be a great thing if only it worked, the pinpoint accuracy can not be achieved with current airsoft guns at longer distances and this is one of the reasons.
I was always frustrated by airsoft gun’s accuracy when I was about shooting bottles and cans in my garden. I wanted to improve my aim and train for real guns, but even after adjusting the hop up, using heavier BBs on a high FPS gun I could not achieve the great accuracy.
After some time I realized that it should not matter much because airsoft guns are accurate enough for games and at certain effective ranges under the right environmental conditions, for anything better, you should consider Air guns or real guns.
This is how the ballistics work in airsoft
I like to finish such questions with some physics that will furthermore explain how rifled barrel and hop up work.
If you have heard of „Magnus effect“ it will help you understand the previous stuff easier.
The short explanation of Magnus effect is that when a spinning object moves through the air as a consequence of fluid friction, the air is pulled around it. This leads to the variations in speed on the sides of the object, so the one side is powered with the greater air speed while the other side is powered with the lower air speed.
This concept can be used for airsoft guns because the BB has a very suitable spherical shape and this is how the two mentioned systems work on airsoft guns.