It lives! At last I can reveal my secret project for the winter: radio- controlled infantry!
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff13/sasquevaneach/SV202839.jpg Older members will recall that I spent some time trying to get this working a year or so ago. THE DREAM My original concept was this: A half-track would rumble up; 4 infantrymen would debus from the back, and march (yes, march as in walking) to attack an enemy tank. 2 or 3 of the chaps might be shot, but 1 or 2 would get through to beat up the enemy. Yeh, right. I spent some time trying to get a walking robot to work, and I got as far as this:http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff13/sasquevaneach/ Robot1001.jpg This would walk- just about- if you held it up so as not to put any weight on it, and might be developed into something that might work- just- on a nice flat table. However, working on a bumpy field, and in conjunction with heavy radio-controlled tanks which might occasionally bump into it, was clearly going to be impossible. I found a walking figure for £600, but I it looked fairly fragile. Not the thing with Neil’s “challenged” driving skills anyway. Oh, here’s a silly picture: http://www.robothut.robotnut.com/atomicbat.html Not entirely suitable. I tried various layouts for soldiers with wheels instead of legs, or even tracks, but nothing that didn’t look, as my wife put it, “like a tank with a head stuck on top”. I then went on to building tanks, but still pondered on infantry… ON THE ROLE OF INFANTRY ON THE RADIO-CONTROLLED BATTLEFIELD On a real battlefield, infantry have always been able to attack and destroy tanks. A rifle bullet inside a tank will ping around until it hits something sticky. An anti-tank rifle, bazooka, panzerfaust or RPG can attack it through armour. In WWII a Japanese officer leapt out of the jungle, jumped on a tank and got the commander and gunner with his katana. He was poking around inside for the radio operator when the latter shot him (My father was a tank radio operator in Burma, and told me the story- it wasn’t him though). >From the point of view of a tank crew, infantry are virtually invisible when hiding on cover; easy to kill when moving; and dangerous when close. From the point of view of rc tank combat, that translates as equivalent to a self-operating mine- a stationery single- shot weapon with a degree of aiming- as envisaged in the rules. Trouble is though, I’m not interested in stationery things. I want it to move. The one thing I didn’t want was to have a figure standing on a powered base, like a wargames figure. The figure OK as you can see I went with a powered base. The motors are these : http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=43357&DOY=23m1#specifi motors- the 30:1 ones similar to those we usually use for traversing and suchlike- and the batteries will be 8 x 1.5 V 2,300 mAh rechargeables. These are stacked inside the figures legs- in later models I might try to get them under the base, which will increase stability (and appearance) at the expense of ground clearance. I considered having a separate 12V mini-battery for the radio, but haven’t at the moment. ON RADIO CONTROL I went for these key-fob transmitters: http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=30323&doy=22m3 You’re probably wondering why I didn’t go for a straightforward rc unit using servos (adapted for continuous movement) for power. The point is that I don’t see infantry on the RC battlefield as just tiny slow single-shot tanks. To put it another way, I don’t want to play with one soldier, but a whole army (well, say, 2 or 4) bwahahah! OK sorry about that but with these controllers- which are coded- I can have 4 separately controlled figures each with a separate controller, and a 5th master controlled keyed to all 4 so that I can control them separately or together (SQAUD left turn!) This was 1 or 2 can get shot but the rest can carry on. A little- just a little- like real life. WEAPONS SYSTEM My first thought was a spring-loaded bazooka. Springs are much less trouble than compressed air, I think. The only trouble is that I didn’t feel that a bazooka would really look right- I couldn’t see a standing figure charging across the battlefield with a shouldered bazooka, and if he was in the kneeling position then my opponents would say that he wasn’t really a big enough target. Another problem is that it could only be single-shot. Now, the rules assume single-shot but while that is fine for static models but imagine going to the trouble of creating a squad of moving infantrymen who charge up in a half-track, debus, charge tanks/guns Somme-style, losing 3 of their number, then arrive within their (very short) range then oops miss so let’s go home again. I think he should get a 2nd shot. I had an idea based on a medieval trebuchet- a spinning arm with 3 or 4 paintballs inside it- but having realised that that would never work I went for torsion-power, using pieces of luggage elastic. If you look at the left arm, it’s got a piece of elastic attached to the base. This is the “just fired” position. If you imagine winding the arm anti-clockwise about 340 degrees, the elastic will tension and a trigger (in his chest) will hold it in position with the arm held low in front of his body. Put a paintball in the hand (it had a hand but it fell off last time I test-fired it- the elastic is quite strong) let it go and the figure bowls it underarm at the target. Fit another arm on the other side (I’ve got an idea for the trigger- I’ll explain that later) and you’ve got a 2-shot figure that bowls paintballs (representing grenades or sticky-bombs) at about groin height 3-4 inches from the ground. That, by the way, is much better than bowling overarm 15-16 inches from the ground, where the shot is likely to sail over the target. So that’s were we are so far. The “head” is just a screwdriver inserted to give an idea- I can model heads. Action Man (who, oddly, appears to have joined the Village People) is there to show the size. The figure will have cotton clothes to hold everything in place (wool would be more authentic but I’m not taking a dry-clean-only figure to a paintball battle and anyway, wool looks a little fluffy at this scale). Hopefully we will end up with a 1/6th scale figure that can cope with a reasonably flat field, will be reasonably rebust, cheap enough (about £70) and simple enough that I can field several, repairable, and moderately authentic both in terms of appearance and (more importantly) function. What do you think? Phil “Generalissimo” Palmer --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are currently subscribed to the "R/C Tank Combat" group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] Visit the group at http://groups.google.com/group/rctankcombat -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
