Planet Eclipse GEO4 - Behind the Scenes #7 Part 1
Welcome to the newest addition of our "Behind the Scene" series. Today we interview Ledz of Planet Eclipse about the new GEO4 and EGO LV1.6. Let's start with the GEO4 first.
Fire vs Ice. EGO vs. GEO. The rivalry which started in 2009 is back. How do you feel about that? What has changed?
Ledz:
We love it... If we didn't we wouldn't have done this. We try and listen to our customers and we can't always do what they want us to do. Sometimes we lurk on Facebook pages and in forums listening to what people want and how they preferred "Model X" from "Year Y" and its still the best marker we have ever made. Which is not really true, but we understand that sometimes when you take away what they loved in model X from year Y to move onto a better platform it can leave customers feeling a little let down. The GEO3.5 sold OK but when we stopped making it we got a huge wave of players that just didn't want to give it up.
Even down to some of our Pros that just loved the GEO3.5 and continued to use them when they should really have been shooting the CS1. So its hard to ignore that. The same for the LV platform. I personally love the LV and it was a sad day when production had to stop. Demand had very much dropped off for a poppet valve marker and we had some production issues that just made making the LV too hard to do without making compromises and we didn't want to make them, so the LV platform got mothballed. But now its back! But when we launched the Geo we pitched it head-to-head with the Ego. Poppet versus Spool. And we've brought that rivalry back in 2020 with LV1.6 v Geo4.... It should be fun!
The GEO4 design is very different compared to its predecessor. How did you accomplished that?
Ledz:
As we mentioned above, after we launched CS1 a lot of players came to us and said they didn't really get why we had changed the ergonomics of the CS1 as much as we had. It felt radically different to the Geo3.5 it replaced. Which in a way is why we called it CS1, rather than Geo4 at the time. We changed so much on it, including how it feels to hold and shoot, that we thought it deserved a new name. But here we are now with what we feel is probably a much more natural progression from Geo3.5 This really does feel like a Geo4, rather than a CS2.
The ergonomics will feel much more familiar to those that loved the Geo3.5 the grip angle is changed. the grips are changed. It feels like it has a wide stance, for control and comfort, but also much more compact than a CS1. This is all achieved through the changes we made to the frame and grip angles. You really do have to hold it and shoot it to understand just how good this gun feels.
The GEO4 has a revised soft tip bolt called Cure ST2.5. What has changed and why it’s so awesome?
Ledz:
We created a new Soft Tip bolt for the GP Core in the CS2 and it has worked increadibly well. The old CS1 soft tip bolt was always a bit of a pain because it was great when it worked, but the tip would sometimes swell in hot and humid conditions and then the marker would struggle to cycle. The new CS2-style soft tip has none of those issues but is still super gentle on paint. So we put those improvements into the GEO4 bolt.
We noticed the fore grip/battery carrier of the GEO4 has changed. Why was it changed and what does it do differently?
Ledz:
With the old CS1 foregrip it was sometimes possible to grip the foregrip too hard and if you then pulled down on it, the batteries inside could break contact with the terminals and the gun would shut off. We learnt our lesson there, and on CS2 we completely encased the batteries inside the hard composite battery housing so that the players couldn't grab them in play. For Geo4 we have tweaked the foregrip so that there is now a hard plastic shield inside it so that we get the same kind of protection for the batteries. It's just adding more reliability to the package.
This is part one of our "Behind the Scene" series of the Planet Eclipse GEO4 and EGO LV1.6. Next you'll read exciting stuff about the new EGO. Stay tuned!