Elite Colourway Load Out Progress - Hydration Bladder

Long games require the squishy meat sack operating the blaster to be replenished. With a large equipment load and running about all day, you're going to need a lot of water. The back of a vest is usually a large spot that's left empty since it's harder to reach behind you to grab stuff that's placed there. Sure, you could pop spare mags for team mates there but it's not always guaranteed you'll get them back or have folks to share them with. Sure, you could cover it in Velcro and then patches but surely you could manage do both and make use of the space.

Enter my MOLLE mounted hydration bladder. Containing a full 3L water bladder and hose, between this and the 1L bottle that will sit on my skirmish belt, it should give me enough water for a full day's play. The MOLLE tape is entirely loop tape so there's plenty of footprint for patches to be mounted.

The bladder itself is hung from the Velcro closing loop sewn into the area just below the closure flap.

The pouch then contains two pathces of MOLLE mounting to secure the pouch to the MOLLE panel. Considering that 3L of water is 3kg and it has a liquid inside, that's a lot of shifting mass that needs to be properly secured. It's unusual that I won't just let a thing hang off a single MOLLE mounting panel but this is unique in terms of equipment hence the unusually secure attachment.

Next steps on this one will be to find a hook to clip the pipe hose into on the front of the vest so I can access the hose when the vest is worn. They're available via eBay usually and pretty handy for securing ready access to water. I might also create a hose cover for the pipe itself using some orange waterproof nylon. The clear blue of the bare hose looks a little weird over the fabric of everything else. Pipe covers tend to break things up by having a bit more of a wrinkled surface texture while bringing a splash of bright colour over what will be the black of the vest.