A typical question that many people ask is whether playing paintball of any kind (military simulation, speedball, etc.) is a painful experience. You've heard that people get welts from paintball strikes... but people get cuts and bruises from bowling too...
There exists the belief that getting hit by paintballs is considerably more painful than any other type of basic sporting roughness. This is understandable given the use of guns to propel projectiles at high speed - the observer's perspective is easy to understand without more research.
I have read hundreds of online answers to this question... and found none of them satisfactory, so I herein make my description. I will attach no bias, but I strongly believe that there is a generalized belief that paintball is a very painful sport, which then nucleates into a reason many do not partake. I hope that my description will be the most scientific to date, and will more accurately answer this question better than the current information available.
The most dominant response to the question "Does getting hit by a paintball hurt?" is that it "depends," (a typical lawyer's response). This is true, but rather useless information overall.
You are being struck by a semi-solid object at what appears, even without any experience in the matter, to be high-speed... Of course there will be a nervous response of some kind... some pain of some sort should potentially be involved...
So let's start with the basics. A paintball is a universally defined projectile by every manufacturer. There are two basic variants. The most popular, and by far the most common, is the .68 caliber spherical gel-skin paintball. There are many, many formulas for the gelatin-capsule covering of the paintball, and the "fill" consists of a vegetable oil-based dye with other water soluble materials. The second, much rarer type is the .43 caliber Paintball manufactured chiefly by the Real Action Paintball Company.
These two are, for the purposes of this article, going to be treated the same.
Paintballs average 3.2g/each according to manufacturing specifications. Assuming the maximum regulation speed of 300ft/s, (91m/s) neglecting all other factors, the paintball leaves the barrel of a paintball gun with approximately 13.2J of energy. With air drag, it experiences a deceleration of approximately 200m/s^-2.
This all means the following. If you are hit by a paintball at close range (within 20ft) the amount of energy transferred to your bare skin is about an order of magnitude greater than if struck at the gun's roughly maximum "lethal" distance of about 170ft, depending on many environmental and equipment conditions.
At this range, the blow against bare skin is considerably painful, and will cause edema and skin damage (a "welt") which will persist as a painful bruise for several weeks. Broken skin is possible, but mainly as a shearing force, and hence, not representative of actual transfer of momentum.
At this close, unprotected range, paintball is a painful sport. While not being clinically dangerous, there has simply been too little a reduction in the ball's energy before striking. Multiple hits, common with today's very highspeed markers, will lead to multiple welts aforementioned, and has been known in some cases to break small bones (almost exclusively wrists and hands) at extremely close range.
Scary? Not quite. There are many mitigating factors to this worst case scenario (Close range, unprotected skin, maximum speed paintball, near-automatic fire). The most obvious should be that the paintball breaks upon impact. Instead of 2v, which is the energy required by your skin to repel the intact paintball at the same velocity it hit you with, a vastly reduced fraction of v (impact velocity) is experienced. Paintballs are engineered to break on impact, marking the target, and falling to the ground with minimal back-traverse, (deflection).
This is not always the case, but we'll discuss that soon.
The effects of unprotected skin, maximum speed paintball and near auto-fire are reduced by the simple rule that no very-close range firing take place. Over a longer distance, the force drops as a square root power law, and hence, the effects become much less traumatic.
And yet close-range firing occurs all the time in paintball, despite being illegal by most field rules, but people are RARELY injured, so why doesn't this happen more often? (in 5 years of play I have never once seen any injury which caused someone to stop playing... that said, I've seen people play a with broken leg...). Let's now modify some other factors.
First of all, only an idiot or a masochist plays with much bare skin exposed. While there are various paintball armor contraptions in existence, and many carry equipment and other paraphrenalia which serve the same purpose, simply wearing a heavy shirt with sleeves and jeans reduces the effects very noticibly.
Second, the maximum speed of a paintball is RARELY experienced. Despite the extreme drop in velocity and trajectory over distance, prevailing winds, paintball shape, and uneven distribution of propellant gas makes the maximum velocity very unlikely. Most strikes occur (presuming about 30 ft of distance) in the bottom half of the ball's velocity distribution, which is presumed Gaussian.
Most people wear some kind of protection (other than the requisite mask), and so even under rapid CQC fire rarely report more than the standard welt, even from multiple strikes. Wearing a baggy sweatshirt, for instance, actually "catches" the paintball by prolonging its impact time. (Same principle used in crush-front automobiles and airbags... it's called the impulse reduction distance - if you're a boxer... you might take the opposite approach to solving this problem to your advantage...).
Once the paintball's impact parameters (distance) have been distended... the energy transfer is miniscule (tenths of a Joule). This is the reason many players don't realize they've been hit - they simply don't feel the strike. (though of course they're usually accused of cheating by the uninformed physics community, or the angry teenager who scored the hit.)
The temperature that paintball is played at has 2 effects. The first is skin temperature, and the second is air temperature. In colder weather, the skin contracts and is more sensitive to topical blows. Compounding this, paintballs also tend to contract in the cold, making their gellitin shell slightly harder. Again, this effect is mitigated by proper clothing and a decent respect for CQC firing. That said, the effect is highly variable (remember "it depends?") due to the interesting effect that cold air is denser, and hence produces a higher drag on the paintball... POSSIBLY reducing its velocity at a faster rate.
At higher temperature, both the skin and the paintball gellitin are more pliable and softer, hence being struck in warm conditions is noticeably less of an effect, even on bare skin (I should mention I have documented experience with all these effects, not just on myself, but other players).
Other Factors:
Certainly the region of the body the player is struck at is relevant. Being hit in the shoulders (one of the most common striking regions) is generally known, c.p., to be relatively painless. Likewise with the arms and upper back. The legs, abdomen, and groin tend to be the most painful, correlating with the vast numbers of nerve endings present in these regions. Direct strikes to the groin are extremely uncommon for several reasons involving the motion of play and the position of the players referential to each other in cover, etc. That said, this is for both genders typically very painful, and is prevented by the use of heavy clothing such as work jeans, or the use of some kind of athletic protection.
Strikes to the chest and skull tend to be less painful, though range has a significant effect on these particular regions... given that bone is being struck. In general hits to the back of the head are not so much painful as surprising. Some small edemas would be expected, but otherwise no clinically significant pains or injuries can result. A helmet removes this issue from play.
Finally, the most significant physical location (I assume masks are worn of course...) is the neck and throat region. This is probably the only real concern that should be mentioned seriously. Having been struck in the throat several times from an automatic at about 50 feet, I will report that it is extremely painful. It is also significantly dangerous, perhaps the only real danger in paintball at all. Strikes to the larynx (well known in ancient martial arts practices) are dangerous in their ability to crush or damage the windpipe, or cause respiratory distress through muscle spasm, or damage the delicate and crucial blood vessels (jugulars and carotids amongst others) in the neck.
This can, and should, be an eliminated threat by merely wearing an $8 neck protector sold for this purpose. The simple hardened cloth/leather/plastic/rubber variants completely mitigate strikes to the neck and throat, rendering them harmless and painless. In addition, more and more mask manufacturers are now extending the chin portion of the mask further down, additionally shielding this region.
Now let's be a bit qualitative.
Some people play paintball because it can in some instances be painful. There are numerous psychological abstractions to explain this behavior, but suffice to say, that is their prerogitive. If this is not your desire, I can say with great confidence, and repeated experience, that paintball is a painless experience, and more importantly, a tremendously entertaining and thrilling endeavor.
Wearing proper protection (Mask, neckguard, heavy clothing) will mitigate any possibilities of injury from paintballs at all but the closest of distances. That said, being struck hurts enough to sting, but almost never hurts enough to make you want to leave.
Sports popular in the United States, from football and hockey, where protection is extremely well documented, to the the notoriously lax baseball, produce hundreds of thousands of severe injuries every year to all ages. (41,000 concussions/year from football, amongst other assorted deaths, and severe limb, spine and orthopaedic injuries). Despite this, paintball is still often viewed as a dangerous exchange of competition.
My simple recommendation is the play and find out. Wear some protective clothing, and go play. Worst case... you get hit once and decide it's fairly painful... not for you. (Never seen that happen out of seeing many 5-600 new players). Best case... you might find that it's just the thing you were looking for.
Nothing more popular in the human species than shooting each other. Might as well try it without that whole messy dying part.
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