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Stealth Pods
By Bill Mills - May 2004

For any scenario player who has spent their time crawling through pitch-black woods only to be discovered because their paint rattled in the pods on their packs, Desert Oasis Paintball has developed a solution to the problem of noise pollution.

Stealth Pod liners are inserts made of a rubber-like material.  With a surface covered in hundreds of small nubs, they are molded to fit inside Gen X Global paintball pods.  While the liners are available individually and can be trimmed to fit other brands of pod, Desert Oasis sells them preinstalled in GXG pods. 

In addition to their sound dampening properties, the liners are designed to provide protection for paint against cold weather and physical impacts like taking a shot in the pack.  The liners themselves are available in a variety of earth tone colors as well as a camo pattern, which show somewhat faintly through the translucent pods.

The sound dampening effects of the Stealth Pods come with a trade off in the amount of paint that can be carried in each pod.  A Stealth Pod holds 96 paintballs as opposed to 120 in a stock GXG pod. 

So how quiet are the pods?  WARPIG.com conducted a simple test to find out.  A sound test was performed in a quiet room, where the ambient sound reading ranged from 51 to 54 decibels on a C weighted scale.  

A Stealth Pod and unlined GXG Pod were were filled to capacity and neither pod made a detectable sound when shaken or inverted.

Then the pods were emptied and thirty paintballs were put into each.  The pods were inverted quickly, and peak sound measurements taken from a distance of eight inches, ten times for each pod.

The unlined pod produced an average peak sound of 63.5 decibels, while the Stealth Pod produced an average peak of 57.1 dB for an average reduction of 6.4 dB.  Consistently through the test, the lined pod would generate 58 dB of sound when tipped lid down, and 56 when turned round end down, barely noticeable over the ambient sound of the quiet room.
 
 

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