R/C Naval Combat

I was reading one of the other threads that had wandered pretty far off topic, and the subject had changed over to building a pond, and what the minimum size would be. 

This got me wondering, what are the smallest bodies of water people have battled in?

The following pictures are of the 'mudhole' that we battled in over Labor Day weekend this year. I'm not sure of the overal dimensions, but there was a lot of unusable area that resulted in a lot of groundings. Hopefully the pictures give a decent sense of scale. 

Everything left of the Derf here was too shallow to be usable.

To the 'upper-left' of the Scharnhorst here is also unusable

The I-boat is near the edge of the usable area again in the upper-left

and that let the little boats Pick on them Right!! I love scharnhorst!!!! Anyway, when my family was living in Burke VA, we had a runoff strem back behind the townhomes. and if we were this there I would have had a place to run both of my ships!!
Nikki

A tennis court would be big enough for Big Gun - just barely. I'm talking about the minimum size that would be fun, battle after battle. The thing is that to have the full experience of combat, you really need to have room to maneuver, and at least some chance of running away to regroup.

By the way, you really don't need 3 feet of depth. A foot to 18" is plenty. This is especially important to consider if you have to pump water to keep the pond full.

Our artificial pond: 46' x 70' - is only made of 2" x 12"s. That means the depth is rarely above 10 1/2". But that's still around 18,000 gallons of water.

Rob

Posted By Dustin on 25 Oct 2011 09:49 PM
This is very informative as I have been thinking about this topic a lot the past year. There is some property I have an eye on with a pond that is about 60' x 115' in the late summer and 70' x 175' in the spring and fall. The biggest problem is that the battle site (and house that goes with it) are in a flood plain, and there have been floods that have closed the road twice in the past three years.

Flood season just means the pond is closer to the road

Danielle and I played around a little today with her tramp steamer the SS War Penquin in our creek.. yeah, creek.  It was fun and actually had a lot more room to move around then I expected.  We actually think if we had a handful of really tight turning Dreadnoughts we could have a mini battle in the slow part of the creek... it would be kinda interesting. 

The pond at my parent's house is a great size.  We used to have battles there every Labor day weekend.  Sadly, it's been about 8 years since it was cleaned out of weeds and they have totally taken over.  It's going to be a major deal to get it deweeded again since it's been left alone for so long.  But during the winter all the weeds die off and it's a great place to test boats still.  I'm counting the days until cold weather allows me to go sail boats again..

It is a great size.  Big enough to allow lots of room to move around and retreat (panies) but no so big that ships that get disabled drift really far away.  It WAS a little deep in parts, but not too crazy, maybe 10-12 feet in the very middle.  However, most of the time the ships that sunk landed ontop of a underwater weed bed 4-5 feet under and just got stuck in it and didn't go all the way down. 

Pictures from last year doing some ship testing. Heh, it's not normally that brown as it is in the first couple of pictures, there had just been a huge storm and the creek was rushing in pretty hard.