Length is a big area of debate. How long should the barrel be? Really a barrel is composed of two parts on most modern barrels, the unported portion and the ported portion.
Porting, what is it? Porting is simply the holes in the barrel other than where the ball goes in and out. They are the small holes concentrated around the outside of the barrel near the end of the barrel. What are they for? All the porting does is try and make the barrel more quite when you shoot the gun, nothing more, nothing less. The let some of the air out the sides instead of all the air making a popping sound as it blasts out the front of the barrel.
Some people claim they do other things, but I don't believe it. Some claim that they help lower the air pressure in front of the ball as it moves through the barrel. I read of a test to see if that was true. They used high speed cameras with a stream of smoke rising in front of an unported barrel. If the ball was pushing the air in front of it the smoke would move before the ball came out, it didn't. The ball came out first then the air moved. (I am looking for the web site, but can't find it right now.)
Once the ball gets to the porting, the air pressure starts decreasing as some of the air exits out of the holes. So at that point the ball should be going as fast as it is going to be going. It should only decrease in speed after that. For example let's say you had a barrel with a five foot section of porting. Once the ball enters the porting section the air behind it starts to dissipate and will no longer accelerate it. Now the rest of the barrel can do nothing but slow the ball down with friction as the ball touches the inside of the barrel. Of course no one makes a five foot ported barrel and that is why. A few inches of porting is fine, it is not long enough to slow the ball appreciably and you get the benefits of a more quite barrel.
Other people claim they help prevent air from blowing over the ball as it comes out the barrel causing turbulence or spinning the ball. I don't know if that is true or not. However I do want porting on my barrel to help decrease the sound and if it also helps prevent or lessen air blowing over the ball as it exits the barrel, then great.
So how long should the ported part of the barrel be? A few inches is good, but more than eight inches worth and I would be leary. Not to say it would be horrible, but you are starting to move into the area where the inefficiencies may overcome the good effects.
Now how long should the barrel be before the ported area? Depends.
Shouldn't it be long like a rifle barrel so it can shoot longer and more accurate like a rifle? NO. Rifles shoot bullets. Paintball guns shoot paintballs. Big difference. Why? A bullet is solid a paintball has a liquidly core. A rifle get's it's accuracy from grooves in the barrel that spin the bullet as it passes through giving the bullet stability in flight, like a gyroscope. For the conventional paintball barrels, the paintballs do not have any intentional spin.
A barrel should be at least a certain length to allow the paintball to accelerate to speed. However if the barrel is much longer than what is needed to accelerate the ball, then it starts to slow the ball back down with friction. I have read that the ball accelerates in the first eight to ten inches of the barrel. With that in mind the most efficient barrel would have between eight and ten inches of unported area and some porting to suit your tastes. Of course this would be what is most efficient, but in practical terms you do not have to have the most efficient barrel because you can turn up the velocity on your gun to get the paintball to travel faster up to whatever your field's fps limits. The only cost of an inefficient barrel is a few more trips to the co2 or HPA tanks for refills, but I doubt you can tell a difference as long as your barrel is within a few inches of these recommendations.
There are other considerations in barrel lengths other than efficiency. The overall length of your barrel will effect how you play. If you have a shorter barrel, like twelve inches, it is easier to play up close to barricades so you are less exposed. Others have an easier time aiming down a longer barrel. I like a twelve to fourteen inch barrel, longer just seems to get in the way and be too cumbersome.
Which brand of barrels? Many to choose from. Several manufacturer's have a good reputation for making good barrels. If I know the ported length and unported lengths are where I want them, why not buy any one of the brand name barrels? An off brand may be fine, but the brands with good reputations earn the reputations be making consistently high quality barrels that don't add unintentional spin on the paintball. Unintentional spin will cause the ball to vary off target. Just like when you have a ball break in the barrel and the next one picks up an uneven amount of paint then goes off on a random path.
So if you are shooting different size paints, you may want different sized barrels to match the paint. One barrel system was designed with this in mind. The Freak barrel system has several sizers to insert depending on the size of the paint you are shooting. A less expensive choice may be having three different barrels, a small, medium and large bore. Or just get one size for the paint you shoot the most.
A large bore barrel can shoot medium and small paint, with some loss of accuracy. But don't try shooting large bore paint in a small barrel or you will spend most of the day cleaning paint out of your barrel from broken paintballs.
Which barrel has the best range? First lets talk physics. Once the paintball leaves the barrel and is going at the field limit feet per second without any spin, it doesn't know what gun or barrel shot it. It will perform exactly like a ball shot from any other gun/barrel combination that can put it at the field limit feet per second without spin. They will both go the same range if they were heading in the same direction at the same fps and same angle. Don't belive me, look at the physics of paintball page , mirror 1 , mirror2 .
Conventional barrels have an effective range of about 150 feet. Farther than that and accuracy is not very consistent and many times the paintballs will not break because they have lost so much momentum through friction with the air. Paintballs are pretty tough. Try dropping one on concrete, it will bounce (unless you are like twenty feet tall). (Don't try this experiment inside, I don't want mom's sending me hate email.)
When I have been talking about range before, notice my examples said without spin on the ball. Okay there are a couple barrels/guns that put backspin on the ball. The backspin produces lift so the ball floats farther than a ball with no spin. The first is the flatline barrel by Tipman. I have never shot one, but what I hear is that the balls do float farther than conventional barrels. Noticed I said "float". The down side is that they seem to do squirrely things and are not very accurate. Also if you don't hold the barrel exactly perpendicular, for instance you tilt the barrel left or right when you are shooting, the ball is going to go off spinning one way or another. Also remember, the likelihood of the ball breaking past 150 feet is not great. If these backspin barrels were so great, don't you think all the tournament players would be using them, hmm.
There is no such thing as the best barrel for everyone. You need to decide what you like, consider overall length, the ported and unported part of the barrel and the size of the barrel, then buy one from a reputable manufacturer. Still don't know, just pick one from a reputable company and buy it. There probably isn't much noticeable difference for the average player. And remember, more expensive does not necessarily mean better when it comes to barrels.
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