Surface for Indoor paintball hall?

[Gyroscope]

The Mountain States Tournament Series Finale was at the National Western Complex in Denver last year. This building is meant for rodeos, but it was great! Good slidding, not too hard... although it was hard. It is a packed dirt floor with not more than 20% horse sh1t content.

Astro turf gets hot! when you slide on astro turf, it melts your kne area on nylon pants. Carpet, as is used in Toronto for Skyball is far superior.

 

[Gyroscope]

Here is a great surface for running, not so good for slides http://www.precisionsurfaces.com/html/surfaces.htm. Maybe surround the bunkers with carpet?

 

[dr.strangelove]

I don't see why you couldn't just lay natural turf. Put down some sod, like the lawn at your home. Water it, cut it, it cleans easily, you can run, dive and slide on it. Baseball, football and soccer stadiums use it, why can't we?

 

[Gyroscope]

Inside a building?

 

[Fluffles]

Thanks for all the replies
The pro\con article on WARPIG was pretty discouraging.. Seems no matter what you choose, you will experience some sorts of problem.

The reason I was thinking astroturf with sawdust on top is that this will allow you to slide \ run etc on the sawdust, and the astroturf beneath will cushion the fall when you pull some psycho stunt :> Also it betters the safety issue, cause if all the sawdust from a key bunker has been 'pushed' aside from slides etc, there will still be astroturf there, and not like solid concrete or anything. But the paint\sawdust goo is damn annoying and I was hoping there was a better way..

Pure carpet wont absorb the paintballs, and will also, like you all mentioned, create rugburns etc.

 

[Liz]

The European Indoor surface at Hilton Park looked pretty much to me like a typical indoor riding arena with a few years of wear. When not sand, these are usually wood bark chips which break down into that nice soft (but rather dusty) sort of mulch - the kind of stuff many people put on their gardens to have a nice effect & save them from having a lawn that needs mowing!

 

[Albercent]

i saw a horse riding event today that used a surface of chopped up old car tyres over a layer of sand and i thought how good it would be for paintball, not to mention cheap...

 

[Liz]

Originally posted by Albercent
i saw a horse riding event today that used a surface of chopped up old car tyres over a layer of sand and i thought how good it would be for paintball, not to mention cheap...

Can be a lovely surface for horses, but having walked over it a few times I would imagine not to good for paintball. The bits of rubber shift around quite easily, so you end up with a very uneven surface that would need to be raked level after a few games. And for those fond of sliding, you'd end up with great big piles of rubber chips behind every barricade with deep grooved skidmarks leading into them. The same would go for the polychip (little blobs of plastic) surface sometimes used for horses.
There's a special kind of sand used for riding arenas called fibresand that might be better for paintball, where the sand has sort of whispy fibres mixed in with it. Might end up looking a bit strange when the fibres get stained by the paint, but they hold the sand together quite well (but it's rather expensive).