In the US, the RCACN rules (
www.rcacn.org) are
more or less the basis for classifying a tanks weight category and establishing general rules for battle conduct, technical specifications etc. (yes, I am generalising here, don't flame me ok?)
Tank class for WW2 is based on average armour thickness (adjusted for slope angle), and post war tanks purely by weight.
In terms of battle circuit performance, the Detroit club asks that your battle circuit and its apple can take a hit as far as it is capable of hitting another tank - so for instance if your DBC apple with its hand build shield takes a hit at 70ft (for instance) but your emitter is only effective out to 65ft you are good to go (indoor test in school gym). The test was performed on all four sides of the apple. A speed test was performed to ensure that no tank was faster than 2mph over the published scale speed.
At the Danville extravaganza in April, the test range was about 30ft (James / Dana / Jersey Bob - correct me if I am wrong here!) for taking a hit, at 90 Deg to all four sides of the apple, followed by a speed test to ensure that a tank is no more than 2 mph over the published scale speed.
Both venues tested the battle circuit to ensure that you took the required number of hits for your weight class - i.e. no declaring a tank as light (with a 3 second reload) but actually having it set to 9 hits to die. Danville inspections are every meeting, DTC generally once per tank only - unless you made a change to the motors/gears/electronics, and then only during winter meets when we had access to the gym
unless the consensus was that something didn't seem right (which was rare, and usually settled amicably with a quick test in front of the assembled members to clear things up)
In the UK:
As everyone knows, we Brits are a lazy bunch generally when it comes to languages (I'm not going to deny that we are famous for refusing to learn a foreign language that is not a dialect of English!
), so the UK 1/16 scale club also follows the US classifications, if not the whole RCACN rule book. At the moment we have no agreed scale speed requirement, nor an agreed test to check apple function.
What I would really like to know from the European Clubs is what do you guys do for classifications, rules, regulations, testing etc? Please post your experiences and thoughts, even if you don't have any formal rules.
Thanks in advance,[8D]
Mart