Talk:FN 303

I replaced the black & White jacked image with a color photo of my own FN 303. MPM2008

I saw his gun in the new Repo Man traler

So . . . what exactly does it launch? - User: 2wingo

It's a glorified paintball gun. It launches 18mm paintballs, some colored, some pepper spray. According to Wikipedia, it was originally developed by a couple paintball companies.--Mandolin (talk) 15:43, 14 December 2012 (EST)

Yeah, short answer is it fires paintballs. Long answer is that it uses compressed air to propel a plastic projectile, where the front half is a hemisphere filled with powdered bismuth, and the rear half is a finned cylinder containing the payload. The purpose of the bismuth at the front is to provide weight to the projectile to give it a big enough impact to incapacitate, and to increase accuracy in combination with the spin stabilisation provided by the rear section. On impact the plastic casing shatters and the powdered bismuth disintegrates dumping all the impact energy into the target with minimal penetration (I hesitate to so none), and the payload is delivered onto the target. The payload is either clear glycol (basically syrup which is used to weight the round for the impact only projectile), green water based washable paint for training, permanent yellow latex based paint for marking individuals for later identification, orange PAVA powder (an irritant similar to pepper spray) or inert white powder for training. The fact that it isn't a sphere like a regular paintball means that it cannot feed from a hopper, but it has far superior range and accuracy. FN now also make a pistol that fires the same round where the propellant is provided by a CO2 capsule in the magazine, which to me seems like a much more practical weapon to carry as an alternative to lethal force for police, as opposed to this which is more specialised for large crowd control situations. --commando552 (talk) 17:03, 14 December 2012 (EST)

That variant called FN 303 P. And yes, it really has a CO2 capsule in the magazine. ([1]) --Andrey Karchikyan (talk) 15:22, 22 February 2014 (MSK)

Other variants

FN 303 P, pistol version of FN 303 - 18mm less-lethal projectile

FN 303 mounted on M16A2 rifle (this variant called M303) - 18mm less-lethal projectile