An 18" cannon is not that much bigger than 16". Our rules (biggun) are 15" or more = 1/4" CO cannon.
All the equipment other than the outer skin is well protected from damage. There is no realistic prospect of "damaging props or rudders". You kill another boat by knocking holes in its skin. Equipment failures are common but the equipment is simply too expensive to leave exposed to cannon fire.
With engagement ranges (for good effect) at under 10 feet (though some ships have been sunk at 30 feet range or more this is very rare) and a SoDak moving at about 2.5 feet per second, the "danger space" to run into engage is quite small. We are also talking about battleships here, they can take a lot of punishment. I would be happy to go toe to toe with a Yamato at a meter or so for 1 or 2 minutes or until my pump output stream got to its full extent and still be confident of getting home. A broadside positioned just right will sink a Sodak or Yamato in seconds (more seonds for the Yamato thats true) but broadsides positioned just right are very rare, normally the damage just slowly adds up till it reaches a critical point when your pump (simulating the subdivision of the hull and damage control parties) can't keep up and she will start to settle and sink - often quite quickly.
A Sodak will sink a Yamato by outmanovering her, but maybe not with repeated passes, slashing attacks are normally what fast, less manouverable ships use against Sodaks rather than the other way round. Normal Sodak tactics are to try and suck someone into a turning duel, then pick the position you want to fight at relative to the other ships and manouver to hang in there for dear life.
Like any sucessful hobby, there are a few competing formats. There are two basic formats "Small Gun" and "Big Gun". In "Small Gun" (the original format) all gun are the same caliber and hold the same number of rounds, all armour is the same thickness, all pumps have the same size outlet, speed are very high, vessels can travel freely forward or reverse and vessels capabilities are abstracted into about 10 general classes. In general this means that a wider range of vessels are viable.
In "big gun", armour is proportional to historical thickness, gun caliber is proportional to historical caliber, speeds are proportional to historic speed (and much lower than small gun), pump output is proportional to displacement and you can mount as many cannon as the historic ship had. This is more "realistic" but only in a very relative sense. The overall concequence is that big ships have all the advantages in Biggun (apart from manoverability) and tend to dominate.
Both are great fun (but although they both use 1/144th scale hulls the two branches of the hobby are not interoperable)
If I were recommending to people which to choose to decome involved in, I would recommend which ever one had an existing group near to them
Smallgun is the only game in town in Canada
http://www.pittelli.com/nabs/
Biggun is the only game in town in Australia
http://www.ausbg.org
(We first tried to set up "smallgun" but could not get help - see http://www.ausbg.org/history.html
In the states you have a wide variety of choices.
The mwci site, www.mwci.org has a nice map of the states to help you find groups and there is a mob called IR/CWCC as well that is sort of national but I don't know much about them - the Canadians might.
The small gunners also have a nationals that run for a whole week and which could be a real blast.
The "big gunners" are not nationally organised in the states but there are major groups in Texas, SF, LA and near Chicago. Links to their websites (and some other nice stuff) are at www.ausbg.org/links.html.
The AusBG also has a CD we did earlier this year that has slideshows, screen savers, a copy of our website and a (MPEG-1) version of a program the Australian Broadcasting Corporation did on the battlegroup. They can be obtained from the chaps at the "Bowning Shipyards" at www.ausbg.org/BSY for a few dollars (1 USD for the CD plus postage). It sort of gives you a taste of what it is all about.
Searches on Google for "model warship combat" or "rc warship" will also tend to find losts of interesting hits.
Well actually the combat is more like how battles in the "Pre-dreadnough" era from around 1860 - 1900 was expected be like. "Melee" or "dog fight" is how it is normally described.
The ships look like "dreadnought" era ships but the practicalities of combat make for "point blank" combat - the one form of battle dreadnoughts were explicitly designed to avoid (Dreadnought and the "single caliber armourment" were explicitly design to fight at range).
So think "pre-dreadnought" - Majestics, etc and you are on the right tactical track. The only real difference is that ramming is forbidden as are pyrotechnics.
Well actually Bill, I have been playing around with this hobby for a while (Oct 2000) and I would suggest you try it (lots of places in the States to do it) before deciding if it is not the way you would like it. Everyone (myself included) has heaps of ideas of how to "improve" it when we first start, and some are useful but many just don't turn out to be practical and you normally work that out for yourself fairly quickly.
As to the Yamato, the weakpoints of a RC Warship will be different to that of the actualy ship, but they will be very real. In the historical Yamato the connection of the anti-torpedo bulkhead was a major weakpoint if I recall correctly and this is certainly not duplicated, but a Yamato is a monster to fight. We have a few building and I have been trying to work out her weak points so I can put one under with my South Dakota class battleship.
To me, at present, I see her strengths as
1) Very stead gun platform
2) Huge ability to absort damage (very big pump and huge intenal volume)
3) Very heavily armed (plenty of space to arm secondaries)
Weaknesses on the other hand
1) Slow (27 knots)
2) Stears like a brick
3) Accelerates like a brick
4) High freeboard
5) Poor depression on 'A' and 'Z' turrets (decks to wide to get decent depression)
On the other hand my Sodak has the same (scale) main battery (9 * 1/4 CO2 powere cannon), is about the same speed, has a much lower freeboard and is hugely manouverable for a battleship. In a slugfest I would certainly loose, but if I can get close inboard, under her guns, then I can likely get hits in her waterline while she is bouncing her rounds of my deck. In a few months we will find out if I am correct.
You do have to defeat her using your wits, she will make minemeat of anyone trying to just slug it out, its just her weak points are in slightly different places than the historical prototype.
Incidentally, the biggest problem with a Yamato is if one is sunk, then she is 70lb or more (plus the water inside) of shipping to pull up from the bottom of a dam and into your dingy. Quite a challenge to land her. We are still working on how to do that reliably. It does not help she is about 7 feet long either. Our dingy in Sydney is only an 8 footer.
For those interested, you can find me here
http://www.ausbg.org/people/richard_simpson.html
or email me at webmaster@ausbg.org if you have other questions.
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All the equipment other than the outer skin is well protected from damage. There is no realistic prospect of "damaging props or rudders". You kill another boat by knocking holes in its skin. Equipment failures are common but the equipment is simply too expensive to leave exposed to cannon fire.
With engagement ranges (for good effect) at under 10 feet (though some ships have been sunk at 30 feet range or more this is very rare) and a SoDak moving at about 2.5 feet per second, the "danger space" to run into engage is quite small. We are also talking about battleships here, they can take a lot of punishment. I would be happy to go toe to toe with a Yamato at a meter or so for 1 or 2 minutes or until my pump output stream got to its full extent and still be confident of getting home. A broadside positioned just right will sink a Sodak or Yamato in seconds (more seonds for the Yamato thats true) but broadsides positioned just right are very rare, normally the damage just slowly adds up till it reaches a critical point when your pump (simulating the subdivision of the hull and damage control parties) can't keep up and she will start to settle and sink - often quite quickly.
A Sodak will sink a Yamato by outmanovering her, but maybe not with repeated passes, slashing attacks are normally what fast, less manouverable ships use against Sodaks rather than the other way round. Normal Sodak tactics are to try and suck someone into a turning duel, then pick the position you want to fight at relative to the other ships and manouver to hang in there for dear life.
Regards
Richard
www.ausbg.org
In "big gun", armour is proportional to historical thickness, gun caliber is proportional to historical caliber, speeds are proportional to historic speed (and much lower than small gun), pump output is proportional to displacement and you can mount as many cannon as the historic ship had. This is more "realistic" but only in a very relative sense. The overall concequence is that big ships have all the advantages in Biggun (apart from manoverability) and tend to dominate.
Both are great fun (but although they both use 1/144th scale hulls the two branches of the hobby are not interoperable)
If I were recommending to people which to choose to decome involved in, I would recommend which ever one had an existing group near to them
Smallgun is the only game in town in Canada
http://www.pittelli.com/nabs/
Biggun is the only game in town in Australia
http://www.ausbg.org
(We first tried to set up "smallgun" but could not get help - see http://www.ausbg.org/history.html
In the states you have a wide variety of choices.
The mwci site, www.mwci.org has a nice map of the states to help you find groups and there is a mob called IR/CWCC as well that is sort of national but I don't know much about them - the Canadians might.
The small gunners also have a nationals that run for a whole week and which could be a real blast.
The "big gunners" are not nationally organised in the states but there are major groups in Texas, SF, LA and near Chicago. Links to their websites (and some other nice stuff) are at www.ausbg.org/links.html.
The AusBG also has a CD we did earlier this year that has slideshows, screen savers, a copy of our website and a (MPEG-1) version of a program the Australian Broadcasting Corporation did on the battlegroup. They can be obtained from the chaps at the "Bowning Shipyards" at www.ausbg.org/BSY for a few dollars (1 USD for the CD plus postage). It sort of gives you a taste of what it is all about.
Searches on Google for "model warship combat" or "rc warship" will also tend to find losts of interesting hits.
The ships look like "dreadnought" era ships but the practicalities of combat make for "point blank" combat - the one form of battle dreadnoughts were explicitly designed to avoid (Dreadnought and the "single caliber armourment" were explicitly design to fight at range). So think "pre-dreadnought" - Majestics, etc and you are on the right tactical track. The only real difference is that ramming is forbidden as are pyrotechnics.
As to the Yamato, the weakpoints of a RC Warship will be different to that of the actualy ship, but they will be very real. In the historical Yamato the connection of the anti-torpedo bulkhead was a major weakpoint if I recall correctly and this is certainly not duplicated, but a Yamato is a monster to fight. We have a few building and I have been trying to work out her weak points so I can put one under with my South Dakota class battleship.
To me, at present, I see her strengths as
1) Very stead gun platform
2) Huge ability to absort damage (very big pump and huge intenal volume)
3) Very heavily armed (plenty of space to arm secondaries)
Weaknesses on the other hand
1) Slow (27 knots)
2) Stears like a brick
3) Accelerates like a brick
4) High freeboard
5) Poor depression on 'A' and 'Z' turrets (decks to wide to get decent depression)
On the other hand my Sodak has the same (scale) main battery (9 * 1/4 CO2 powere cannon), is about the same speed, has a much lower freeboard and is hugely manouverable for a battleship. In a slugfest I would certainly loose, but if I can get close inboard, under her guns, then I can likely get hits in her waterline while she is bouncing her rounds of my deck. In a few months we will find out if I am correct.
You do have to defeat her using your wits, she will make minemeat of anyone trying to just slug it out, its just her weak points are in slightly different places than the historical prototype.
Incidentally, the biggest problem with a Yamato is if one is sunk, then she is 70lb or more (plus the water inside) of shipping to pull up from the bottom of a dam and into your dingy. Quite a challenge to land her. We are still working on how to do that reliably. It does not help she is about 7 feet long either. Our dingy in Sydney is only an 8 footer. For those interested, you can find me here http://www.ausbg.org/people/richard_simpson.html or email me at webmaster@ausbg.org if you have other questions.