Im sorry if its an obvious question, but as far as I have heard, Big guns are....well.....bigger, and I think non traversible.
Actually, the most common Big Gun design, the Indiana cannon, is designed to rotate. They frequently have elevation/depression controlled as well. On the other hand, I have personally only seen one fast gun rotate. Ammunition sizes range from 1/8" to 1/4" (.125-.25"), whereas fast gun is uniform at .117". The biggest difference IMO is that fast gun (and Treaty) use combat units or "class X gets Y units" with a unit being either a pump or a 50 round BB cannon, and Big Gun lets you arm anything over 3" in caliber on the original. An Iowa class in Fast gun (MWC) would be eight units, so seven 50 round BB cannons and a pump. Big gun would give you 3x3 1/4" primaries and 10x2 .177" secondaries and a pump.
How would one fit RC equipment into 1/144 scale airplanes anyway? Also, any 1/144 scale aircraft light anough to fly is likely too light to have enough mass to punch thru the balsa.
In a nutshell , correct if wrong.... big gun -slower rate of fire, more guns, different ammos, more armor options available, no battle reverse Basically battle with the guns more so to speak (evevate, rotate, huge volleys of ammo) Fast gun - fast rate of fire, just bb's, just 1 armor (1/32nd balsa generally) battle reverse allowed basically battle with ship- forward, reverse, turning to get shots on and get out of dodge before getting sunk.
Iceman has it almost right. First, however, I think it is important to point out the similarities. Both Big Gun and Fast Gun use 1:144 scale, ships from WWI and WWII. Ships have large penetrable windows sheeted in soft balsa wood ships are armed with cannons firing round steel shot ships battle damage, and sink each other construction and operation of ships is regulated by a set of construction, safety, and combat rules to ensure fair and fun play. From there, Big Gun and Fast Gun differ in technical details. Specifically, Big Gun: several different thicknesses of armor based on historical several different sizes of shot based on historical scale speed based on historical limited rate of fire, unlimited ammunition, limited pumping (GPH), and penetration limit on gun safety turret rotation and depression are common on battleships Fast Gun: one thickness of balsa armor one size of shot speed based on ship class and length, unrelated to historical or scale unlimited rate of fire, strictly limited ammunition, limited pumping (outlet size), and pressure limit on gun safety turret rotation is extremely rare even on ship classes allowed rotation. Some individual clubs have placed limits on reverse, most don't care and have no restrictions.
For Speeds Big Gun uses relative scale speed and fast gun uses hydrodynamic scale speeds. So ships that were faster in real life are faster in big gun. However in Fast gun the ship's interaction with the water is closer to the real thing. So they are both scale speeds, just different scales. From a physics perspective fast gun is more "scale" and from a "hey that ship was faster in real life" perspective big gun is more "scale". In the end neither club seems to have a problem with how the speeds work. It would seem that being right on the allowed speed (not the easiest thing to do in the world even with ESCs) is much more important in Big gun, the 2 second gap between speed tiers in fast gun helps to account for ships often being slightly slower than the allowed speed (ie 24.5 sec instead of 24.01 sec). IceMan's answer was the best Ive heard describing the differences in formats (ie battle with guns vs battle with ships so to speak)
Close, Snipehunter, however: Big Gun speeds are not scale speeds but are scale speeds adjusted for the interaction with unscaled water (somewhat) as determined by the Froude Factor - information here .www.applet-magic.com/froude.htm and some additional tweaking that was a rule of thumb for cinematography that I forget. The actual number calculated by Froude's Law for 1/144 is, I believe, something like 12 times actual scale speed. The factor Big Gun uses is, as best I recall somewhere between 7 and 8 times scale speed. Interestingly, we have found that many ships, when pushed pased their design limits in knots at the Big Gun scale do tend to self-swamping from excesive bow waves. In a nutshell, it works out, in Big Gun to about 0.1km/h per knot of the original historical ship. As already noted above, Big Gun uses historical numbers (most clubs employing Coanway's All the Worlds Warships) as the reference to determine armament, armor, speed, etc. It should be noted that WWCC uses a radar gun, and NTXBG uses a speed trap to determine speed, so it is not that difficult to "dial in." Cheers,
Thats pretty much what i said but I left out the mathy parts since only a few of us crazy people actually care. Big gun speeds are scale relative to each other, just like fast gun speeds are scale relative to the water. When you scale something you have to have a point of reference to scale from. Big gun and Fast gun have choosen two different references. So neither is really more or less scale than the other, just scaled differently with different results. In the end both rule sets seem to have produced games that people like to play (granted a small number of highly wacky people but who's counting) so you could argue that they both work pretty well.
