Thanks for the help. My budget is right at or below 200 for right now. It's the holiday season and bills are tight around here. I know that I'll want a 500 size when I can afford it, but for a good while I probably won't have that much money all at once. On the other hand, scraping together a few bucks for the broken parts on these small, cheap models won't be a problem. I figure that I'll have lots of time to practice (and crash) on one of these little twitchy guys and then the move to a bigger, more stable machine will be all the better when i get to that point. The only reason I'm pressing the idea of the Venom is that it's cheap and my LHS has them, and therefore the parts would be more readily available. However, if the downsides of that particular model would outweigh this luxury, then of course I'd opt for something else. I have read that these Venom helis are not the best craftsmanship out there for this price range. The whole CP vs. FP kinda has me vexed right now. I wanna be able to fly outside in calm conditions and perform like some of the videos I've seen of the AXE but not the Venom NR 2. I hope I'm not overstating the obvious. I'm just anxious to get going, you understand.