R/C Naval Combat

As a one time RC car driver, I thought about that once. Then realized that the battle would eventually move away from the podium and make it harder to see the ships which might promote more rams. The distance would also make it harder to get the right distance to use sidemounts effectively.

There is a reason people on five and convoy ships tend to stay away from shore ... to make it harder for someone to line up cannons and shoot them.

Not sure how well a driver's skipper's podium would work for other ponds, but it wouldn't work too well at my local pond. The shoreline of our battle area is shaped like a gigantic curvy W, with one V being the Allied bay and the other V being the Axis bay. This gives skippers a very wide range of places to stand to best view their ships. Simply going from the Axis side to the Allied side to find prey... I mean targets... I mean opponents, requires at least one change of location, and there are distinct combat advantages to the skippers who move around more often. At our gunnery/maneuvering events, moving around is even more important, because of the need to maneuver through extremely tight spaces and shoot very small, hard-to-hit targets.

I could see this as being useful at the Maker Faire, though. With a much smaller pond and only one side open for skippers, podiums for a better view might be more helpful. Of course, then we'd have to build them and set them up, and we've already got our hands full building the pond :o

Another problem would be the number of combatants! Race car drivers usually number about 6-8 per. heat. We have 20-30 captains at a battle, that would make a rather large podium.

I've seen 47 ships on the water at once for a battle. That is a lot of captains!

20-30 per battle?? Your club is really that big? Or it that something like a NATS event?

And I thought we were doing good when we managed 4 people at one!

The local battles in MN get about 10-14 people. Regionals get 15-20. Nats 40-47. We just had a battle near New Orleans with 27 people.
Here in MN we use to have the 4-5 ships at a battle, but we grown a lot the last 3-4 years.

We average around 8-12 per battle at regionals (GA/FL/NC). Occasionally our brothers from MD come down to party. Other stats as per Bob's experience.

use a scisor jack lift rent or buy one or two large onge plus side the can be moved rather easyliy

do you guys have any battles in SC?

There are an active group of battlers in NC and another in Savannah, GA. Most people have to drive between 3 and 5 hours to get to 'away' battles, so if you're in SC, you're within that range. Where are you?

Landrum near Spartanburg couple miles to Hendersonville NC.

You are about 2 and a half hours from the NC group, a straight shot from Henderson to Albemarle on US-74.

alright but why not come on down here. We got around 7 lakes and 1 big creek and hundreds of ponds. Actually I haven't moved there yet but where I am going my property has 2 creeks on it.

The trick is that the existing group already meets and battles there, and has permission from the park people to battle in the lake. A lot of pond-owners get the willies when you say 'shooting BBs'. When you get moved, if you build a pond I guarantee you I'll come battle on it If you put an island in it I'll bring my tools and we can put in a bridge

Alright I got room to build a nice size pond and my one creek is very big so come on down to Landrum. but where are you Tugboat?

Georgia near the SC border... maybe an hour from Columbia.