I was away yesterday, but sorry to see the thread died, as I thought Frank's questions were worthy of serious responses. I'll offer a couple of thoughts toward answering the questions.
I have been only peripherally working in the hobby on and off, starting with building a minimal-cost wheeled chassis, then going off on a tangent and building a minimal cost and much smaller robot. Both of these were considerably less expensive than Neil's 750-950 UKP estimates, if I consider only the final parts and not the parts that were tried and found wanting. I wanted to answer the question of what is the smallest/cheapest vehicle that I could run in my backyard. I figured that the 1/16 scale tanks were too small, and that grass would foul up the tracks, so something a bit bigger with decent ground clearance would be needed. Some lessons learned were that a small wheeled vehicle of dimensions w= 15", L= 12", 6" wheels, 4" ground clearance can operate on some relatively benign outdoor terrains such as lawn grass, gravel, dirt, quite well. This vehicle used four $10 motors, very low RPM, so the thing is very slow, but very CHEAP! A single 7 AH battery easily lasts an hour. I guess it is similar to an RC rock crawler, but simpler and cheaper. However, most people are interested in tracked vehicles, including me. Earlier this year I started work on a tank. Like my previous efforts, it is more of an experiment in reducing size, weight, power, and cost than anything. I was therefore gratified to see that the Pitellis were thinking on the same lines. I spent/wasted a lot of time selecting what I thought would be the simplest-to-construct tracks. I wound up choosing hinge tracks. I chose a tank that has narrow tracks (Russian "Sprut" assault gun) because at scale, 2" hinges are about the right size, and these smaller hinges weigh less. I wanted to use plastic hinges, but couldn't find any that would work. I'm still not happy with this choice though. In my opinion the track/drive system is the biggest hurdle in building a tank. I would vote for that as the core of any kit. Some more thoughts later. Got to run. -- You are currently subscribed to the "R/C Tank Combat" group. To post a message, send email to rctankcombat@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe, send email to rctankcombat+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com Visit the group at http://groups.google.com/group/rctankcombat
