RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Hallo Happytank, This is a question that has been asked before and will undoubtedly be asked again,
First things first you are upsetting nobody,
To answer your question you have to answer some questions,
Are you a Builder or a user, Do you buy a ready to run Tank straight out of the box which you might adorn with some decent decals or even blow a rattle can or two of paint over it and then pepper the cat with pellets from your airsoft gun,
Or do you buy the components to build YOUR tank but only after researching your particular tanks history ?
So a Metal Taigen hull under a Heng Long body, Taigen Gearboxes and a decent aftermarket control board and a decent smoker and speaker,
These are just for starters!!
Do you use superglue to meld everything or do you favour a Pin vise and tap threads into everything and then meld it all with nuts and bolts and the judicious use of solder and an Iron as well as a butane torch on the Photo-etch?
Are you questioning such detail as to what year did the German Army introduce a particular way in which track cables were mounted on the side of Tiger1s ( They changed often enough that you can I/D a Tigers year in service from such detail),
Do you fight your tank in a club under the rules of I/R combat?
Do you spend a fortune on a top quality Compressor for your Airbrush?
The world of weathering would take ten fullscap pages by itself.
Small tanks such as PZ111s are not easy to get everything in but shop around and an "ASP" or a "CLARK T22" control board will have much greater abilities than the Heng Long or Taigen Control boards and yet are the same size the same with speakers "VISATON" make some very small speakers whose dynamic qualities are surprisingly good,
LI-PO Battery's power to power are smaller than the NIMH or NICAD variety,
"TARR" Smokers are cubed rather than rectangular,
If you line the interior of your Tanks hull with "VELCRO" you do not need to glue or screw any component in place except of course the Gearboxes doing that means you waste no space at all,
If you use cable ties to bind all the wires together you are better able to access everything.
NEVER GLUE, DRILL,CUT, OR SOLDER anything before doing a dry run first.
If you think of something that at the time is nothing to do with what you are doing WRITE IT DOWN FOR LATER,
I promise you will otherwise forget.
I have a coupe of Shelf Queens but even they get a run around the yard a few times a year.

Tank crews carried brooms and rags and paint so when needed they would repaint in the field,
In the Russian campaign in the winter the crews would apply white paint in smears with rags and yard brooms with no particular pattern,
The tank would leave the factory with a Camo pattern straight from the book and it was truly a factory finish,
A shelf queen can certainly be made to look like that BUT in the real world Tanks in war and peace almost never look that good,
Drive a tank off of a transporter trailer and travel five miles cross country and you can forget about factory finish for the remainder of that tanks service.
This is a working fighting vehicle not a Staff car.
When I was in the service when we were back in the depot the vehicles were cleaned with Paraffin soaked rags and painted and free of rust but they were a patchwork quilt of paint coverage.
Don't forget the last coat on your tank should be Acrylic Clear Varnish.

I guess this one has been answered now, but if you are not going to run your RC tank then you could have simply built a static kit. Okay the RC example can come ready made and cheaper (?!) but if you become a competent driver and don't mix it with less competent drivers then the risk of damage is small.

Someone mentioned above that a nicely finished RC model tank can be every bit as good looking as a static shelf queen, which is true. Why then was my offer of showing a few of my models at an upcoming scale model exhibition declined purely on the basis they are all RC models. Yes, they move, fire, smoke, make noise, flash etc. (when turned on) but they hold their own against many statics I've seen. Strange. Maybe I'll just run them around the car park and empty the hall!

No, if your tank can operate, run it and enjoy the experience.

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I guess I'm pretty lucky here. The local model club has a big swap meet every year and last year and this year they asked myself and my other tanker buddies to please come out and do some demos and show off the goodies. This year we'll even have a large area dedicated to just running the tanks around in.

It looks like between me and my buddies, we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of almost 30 vehicles. Should be a blast. I hope to have a working remote camera and viewer for a couple of tanks, as well.

Bill

Son of a gun-ner wrote:

capt midnight wrote:I guess I'm pretty lucky here. The local model club has a big swap meet every year and last year and this year they asked myself and my other tanker buddies to please come out and do some demos and show off the goodies.
Bill

Oh gosh, I've done the Full Monty too. . . .

That reminds me, have you finished your fire truck yet?

I finally received the silicon hoses for it, just been waiting for the weather to cool off to get outside and get wet! Just can't do the heat anymore! As soon as I can get a chance to run it through it's paces, I'll be posting some pictures and video. Amateur pictures, of course!

Bill

Looks like the question has been answered, but i don't see why you wouldn't put as much, if not more effort into an RC tank. Yeah sure it could take a knock, but the real tanks/trucks/vehicles took a knock in reality and they were also fired again. None of them were made perfect to remain that way, they are machines of war.
If it's RC, it just means it can do alot more than just sitting pretty on a shelf.

I seem to enjoy bbuilding and dreaming up cool model builds and don't take enough time to enjoy them. But i am wondering about hiring my local village hall and having a bit of fun and invtiing a few clubs down to show off their stuff and get the public in to have a play.

The thing i love even more than building and driving my RC stuff is handing the controls over to my young kids of 2 & 3 and letting them enjoy them. My son has picked it up soo quickly and i am now building him his very own model. My daughter will get hers aswell in a year or so.
That will give the models some realistic weathering for sure haha.