It's easier if you have regular events. We used to in Georgia, but the kids have grown and gone to college, Brian's busy with work (being a Dean is a lot more work for the extra pay!), and Pete D left to restore his old Jeep. I still love boats and playing with them, but other hobbies are more active. With the SCA (medieval fun) if I wanted to go to an event every weekend, there is an event somewhere within 5 hours every weekend. So I keep my boats and I will battle when there's one within a reasonable distance, but... there's nobody to play with except on rare occasions down here. I could get recruiting... but if it's just me, and we battle 4 times a year... I'll just go measure tanks or play viking or something. More return on my time invested.
At the Hey day of Maryland Attack Group (25+ MEMBERS), we usually had a small get together at the lake every two weeks. Not a large group just about 6-8 of us.
YAF - YetAnotherFormat https://rcwarshipcombat.com/forums/steampunk-flotilla.598/ My problem with new formats is that you really need a cluster of people locally playing it or willing to play it to gain any real traction. Otherwise a person here and a person there, things don't tend to get finished because there is little impetus to do so. Consider even Battlestations - how many BS ships have been finished outside the small knot of people in the Ohio region? Personally I think the Steampunk stuff is a neat idea and I would play it if that was what was local - but it is not local and I'm not inclined towards pushing my local group to adopt it over what we already play.
I think a good way for SP to get some traction is for local clubs to allow SP ships to battle in the fastgun format (at least in non-scored events). We could determine which fastgun designs the three SP ships most closely resemble and designate them that way. As far as broadening participation in the hobby, IMO simplification is the key. Todays hobbyists aren't the most resourceful and they need all the help they can get. This little fact hit me like a ton of bricks one day as a I watched a line of guys (and their kids) drop their kit-built cars off at my local hobby shop for tune-up and repair.
I like the idea of steam punk but not at the risk of diluting the current hobby or directing new recruits into it. We have a hard enough time staying relevant without directing valuable participants into building boats for formats which in this case, as noted, have not taken off yet, and potentially at the expense of a good working ship usable in a current format. Personally I am bored with the current state of things and would like something different however.. if we had 25 guys in Texas battling.. I might have a different opinion. If I had been around a long time ago I would have urged battle-boats that were not based on historical ships.. which would eliminate a lot of the whining and crying we run into today, but they chose historical and we have what we have. We must try to make the best of it.
For years I have been advocating the need for a small easily assembled low-cost ($100 - $150) ship with snap in components, pre-wired, presheeted, and possible even pre-assembled. Basically, make it as easy as possible for an interested person to buy and battle. And yeah, Walmart or big box store distribution would be best. The idea is to draw people into trying the hobby. If they like it enough, they will stay and work towards a bigger ship. If they do not like it, the starter ship will be put away (or sold cheaply) and we would never seen them again. Sure, the number of people that stay will be small, but when working with large numbers, even a handful can add up. This is what is happening (happened) in the RC car and aircraft world. Low cost starter cars/planes to get someone to try it and hopefully be interesting enough to keep them in the hobby and wanting to move into bigger/more complicated cars/aircraft. It is easy to see the trend by simply looking at various hobby distributors and noting the dominance of small low-cost cars/planes in the market. The manufacturers are flexible and will follow the trends, i.e. drones are the hot thing the last few years so more and more makes/models/sizes are being produced. At the moment, I see Strike Models may have the potential to make a small semi-mass produced ship with their injection molding machines. Or maybe anyone want to make a pitch on Shark Tank? Heh.
Bored, I understand that is why I am trying to rework campaign! CONVOY BOATS, more CRUISERS, AIR CRAFT CARRIERS. Scores that would encourage BIG convoy boats!
I'm a new guy with out even one working build under my belt. From my perspective, there are a couple of things preventing us from lowering the cost of entry into this Hobby. The first one is lack of good starter boat. Tugboat's Edgar Quinet thread is an awesome start. We, collectively, need to take it across the finish line. Part of that could be accomplished by getting the vendors to offer some semi-kit options to go with it. Need guns for an EQ? Buy this. Need an ESC/Radio combo? Want a laser cut rib kit? Go here. Want a fiberglass hull? Need a super structure kit? You can see where I'm going. That's the thing about newbies, they don't know how to build and arm a ship, yet. Another is the whole balsa sheeting thing. It's a lot of work and needs to be done over and over and over. The rules for IRCWCC only allow for 1/32" balsa even though there seems to be a perfectly good testing method (rod drop test) that could used to ensure that other materials give similar enough results. If we could use anything that meets the test, then things like duct tape, plasti-dip, and 3d printed sections could make sheeting so easy that newbies wouldn't need to struggle with it. One more area that needs work are the rules about how cannons are activated. Beaver broached this recently and people were able to point to the wording in the IRCWCC rules explicitly stating that they had to be triggered by the throw of a transmitter stick. Technically, that rules out cool things like the buttons that people have hacked on to their radios. By inference, it means one needs to go out and by a 6 channel radio and receiver as the usual RC car radio doesn't have enough channels. Airplane and helicopter guys might have these laying around but kids with rc cars don't. If we want newbies to graduate from cars to warships we need to find a migration path that allows them to re-use as much of their gear as possible. I'm working on a zigbee and or blue tooth fire control module for actuating cannons that would work in tandem with a cheap car radio to control an Edgar Quinet. Unless there are rule changes, I don't think it would be allowed. This one is less about cost and more about giving a newbie in cruiser a chance survive. I'd like to see pressure or proximity activated secondaries. It seems like some battles devolve into hug&slug fests instead of being the coordinated fleet maneuvering chess games that I think most of us really want them to be. As a newbie, I don't want to be trying to deal with cruisers with more fire power than my EQ acting like PT boats blasting me from absurdly close ranges. If there were automatic defenses to simulate the secondary batteries, then I think captains would adopt tactics that more closely resemble how historic engagements were fought.
The EQ is not the type of ship I would recommend to a new recruit. It is a nice ship and the build thread was top notch but it is a novelty ship due to turret size limitations AND the plethora of other ships that are better suited to the hobby and are readily available. Choosing a mainstream ship will help them a great deal as advice and build threads will be more readily available and with longer history of operation and upgrades. Obscure ships don't have the benefit of having dozens of Captains refinements being published on the internet. Building a wooden ship from scratch is NOT an easy option for new guys and will only increase the amount of time it takes for them to finish a boat. I believe the point of the EQ thread was to build a ship with minimal costs and without spending money on big tools. I am not sure that qualifies as an ideal starter ship. I want to see a ship with cannons in a main turret, easy to layout, no more than 3 guns to cut down on complexity, (some say no more than 2), and a ship that will allow them to jump into the fray and become exhilarated by the battle rather than lurk on the fringes.. far from the excitement. Others I am sure have other opinions but from what I have seen.. give a rookie a heart-pounding sortie and he will most likely be hooked for life. This is an expensive hobby.. even if you build the cheapest boat on the water (and by some miracle it works).. you still have to buy insurance, your share of the pond insurance, food, co2, event fees, gas, hotel, bb's, balsa for re-sheeting, weldwood and/or segment, repair parts, spare parts, etc... (or the equivalent of any of these). There will never be a way to make this hobby 'cheap' but costs can be dropped. Specifically targeting folks that simply do not have the money to participate at the same level as others is most likely a waste of resources. I don't mean to ignore folks that want to participate but have to finance it.. I am referring to directing all the energy of finding new captains and making the focus of cost the major barrier to entry. There will always be a minimum cost to get into this hobby and it can only be reduced so far.... then it costs what it costs. Time is he biggest barrier to entry in my opinion however just handing over a used boat with over 100 hrs of time and a lot of money to a rookie for 200 -400 bucks is not the answer either. Then you get into the Walmart boat.. and as they have only a small amount of money invested.. and NO TIME.. they can just throw it away when they get tired of sheeting the ship or doing maintenance. It has happened over and over.... and the loser is .. the hobby. In the end the ideal new recruit will be able to AFFORD this hobby, have the necessary TIME to BUILD the ship, and the time to PARTICIPATE in events. If they are unable to do any of those things.. then you are wasting a lot of energy in vain. It may sound harsh but I have spent hours and hours and hours helping new guys that have NEVER attended an event .. not even to watch... at the expense of working on my own boat. All of that effort did not advance the hobby of Model Warship Combat or my own participation in the hobby.
OK. So more and more I am thinking that the EQ may actually be a waste of my time and, by extension, the time of other new recruits but, I'm curious what "the turret size limitations" you mention actually means? From what I can see the beauty of this vessel is the fact that the extreme fore and aft casemates held the same caliber guns as the turrets and it seems the IRCWCC rules allow them to be armed. That puts 2 full guns nice and low to the waterline in either the bow or the stern. From the time I've spent reading these forums, that is a nearly ideal set up for fast gun hit and run cruiser tactics. If it is not, please suggest a more suitable ship? The main reason I've not been motivated to finish my EQ is that I've yet to work out a recovery mechanism that will allow me to fetch it of the bottom of a pond that will fit. Going swimming to get a NC off the bottom of Ming's moat wasn't that unpleasant but, it sounds like many of the other venues are not so nice (weeds, muck, etc.) Having seen the way Rob setup his Arizona, I think that a floating superstructure with a recovery line that pays out smoothly and is attached to a solid part of the hull should be standard feature of any starter or loaner ship. I just don't know how to fit it into the EQ I have. C&CC is welcome : ) The other ship I read about being a good starter ship is HMS Invincible but, when talking to people in the pits that is class invariably discouraged. I'm starting to see John's point about it being a time investment and it seems that I've squandered some investigating ships that are not actually recommended for newbies : ( What ship is recommended for newbies, has been well documented, and has good vendor support? I've heard good things about HMS Iron Duke for new players. It seems like it'd have more fun to battle, due to having 5 units. The hull seems like it's a simple shape and it's got a lot of beam so, it should be stable and easy to get everything to fit inside nicely. It also looks like the superstructure has enough volume for flotation and concealing a reel. Battlers Connection sells a fiberglass hull so that's time that can be saved. It would be fantastic to have another option for the hull either a cheap set of plans or a laser-cut kit. Both would be nice. I'm not finding a build log for an Iron Duke anywhere. If I missed it, I apologize. So back to the OP's question. I'd say the state of the hobby is we need to get behind a good starter boat (or two?) and make it easy for newbies to join in the fun. If Iron Duke is the right boat, I'd be willing to be a guinea pig.
Here's two. Don't recall how detailed https://rcwarshipcombat.com/threads/iron-duke-build.440655/ https://rcwarshipcombat.com/threads/hms-iron-duke.441076/ Generally the folk who are designing the lasercut kits aren't going for ships that already have a fiberglass hull available. Strike sells plans for the Iron Duck. No idea on plan quality, you'd need to ask Stephen.
it is hard enough to pack everything in some of these ships and then to actually make it all work consistently.. without adding more stuff - and how will you tell friend from foe? I bet you your teammates wont be too thrilled the first time your automated defenses blast holes in them. absurdly close ranges are exactly what fast-gun does. In a way we embody Nelson, 'engage the enemy more closely'. FG has been well described as being 'a knife fight in a phone booth'. Historic engagements of this era would have us sailing in lines and lobbing rounds across the pond, which is not safe or very exciting to partake in. BigGun, being a slower paced game and with less maneuverability and mandatory time between shots may be more what you're hoping for in the Chess Match, unfortunately there aren't many active BG groups at this point in the US.
It's a Goff plan, so it is crap. BC dropped the prices on their fibreglass hulls so I can't think of a good reason to bother with a wood hull unless you really really like wooden boats.
Has anyone been checking out what Vac-U-Boat is doing with the destroyer? Goal is to have a almost RTR ship...
