Hello everyone, I'm new to the RC Tank arena. I've been in the RC Industry since 1980, use to build plane adn helicopters for several clients as well as having several models for myself. I currently fly now and have several helis Ifly on a normal basis. I build and fly scale aircraft so I'm no newby to building or scaling up a scale ship by any means but the point of this post is simple...

I'm trying to find out and make the right decision on purchasing my first tank.

Some finer points I'm looking for in a tank model are as follows:

First I'm looking for one which can be driven in a scale fasion and what I mean is: Being to drive the tank in multiple speeds instead of *on and off* similar to how the giant tanks drive like the 1/6 scale tanks but something along the lines of 1/16th scale is what I'm looking for.

Can you please tell me if the Heng Long tanks offer this type of speed control? I've notices some models can be fitted with 3.1 gearing and all metal gears! will these gears allow a slower speed (scale) if the system has a 2 speed forward control? or should I use different motors and speed controlers to accomplish this?

I understand most of these tanks come with curciut boards already configured to work together with the motors (Gun, Drivetrain and turrent) but in my case, I don't care if Idon't have a simulated firing gun or if it shoots airsoft bb's, I'm looking for actual scale performance. I'm looking to be able to barely creep the tank along or speed it up but to scale appearences, know what I mean?

Isee alot of bells and whistles which come with the HL Tanks form like TankZone... then Isee tanks at Banana Hobby which look the same wiht the same controller as the ones on TZ but they don't say they are HL Tanks! Are these tanks the same models??

I'm confused over all these different sites selling these tanks so please, any help in deciding a good quality tank will be great.

Bottom line in what I'm looking for is this:

~1/16th scale
~Tiger 1 or later
~3.1 Metal gearing (no plastic)
~Preferr metal tracks but pvc will be fine
~Most importantly... Speed control to be able to run at a farely slow creeping speed .

So, doe's the HL tanks offer this out of the box with the different gears?

Sorry for the long post here but I'm a scale nut so this is very important to me. Again I don't care about the sound or firing modules either, Ijust want a good tank to handle different forward speeds similar to scale speeds or the large monster tanks out there.

Thanks everyone....

~Alan~