I’ve gotten into playing around with air pistols lately as a good way of practicing. Going into this subculture, I found this practice called dieseling. It’s when you smear some kind of gel like lube or petroleum jelly around the pellet to create a better seal to maintain a higher pressure behind the pellet to give it better velocities.

But then I came across some claims that air guns were pushing pellets up to 1500 fps. If you google air guns breaking the sound barrier, you will find all sorts of these claims. This is physically impossible because the speed of sound is the limit if you’re using air as a propellant.

People think that “compression of gasses” detonates the propellant, making it achieve supersonic velocities, which doesn’t happen since the pellet is propelled by decompressing gasses.

Like. God damn. I will be smearing some vegetable oil around my pellets though.