Re: Re-inventing the PBM

[Frank Pittelli <frank-at-rctankcombat.com>]

Grauwolf wrote:
> 
> Just to provide some food for thought, take a look at the utterly
> simplistic and compact design utilized  in the weapons system used by
> the Ship-To-Ship Warfare folks. Note the hardware store copper tubing
> and fittings. Now THAT is off-the-shelf!
> 

As someone who built literally hundreds of homemade BB cannons for 
warship combat (we used to make 20-30 during our annual winter 
"gun-fest" building session), I can assure you that building your own 
cannons takes alot of evolutionary iterations to get things right. 
Early gun designs had lots of problems and often worked great in the 
workshop, but failed during the battle.  In warships, that wasn't a 
total disaster, because we had more than one gun on board, but with a 
tank, if your cannon fails the game is over.

About two years ago, I successfully built a paintball cannon based on 
the pressure-powered design of the BB cannons used in warship combat, 
only larger.  (My approach was an evolution of some pioneering work done 
by Lief Goodson in the early 90's when we first started talking about 
tank combat.)  It was built from standard PVC and copper plumbing 
components, with a brass piston assembly that didn't require any 
expensive tools to make.  It worked, fired round after round without a 
problem, and the total cost was probably less than $25 ... but the 
project scrapped.

Why?  Because of two big reasons: (1) commercial markers are very 
reliable and (2) Walmart sells them by the truck-load.  In fact, the 
market is so large that dozens of manufacturers exist, continually 
pushing each other to make better and cheaper markers.  More 
importantly, even the cheapest markers represent years of engineering 
design, subtle changes over time and production level manufacturing.

So, rather than spending lots of engineering time to save $25-50 on the 
marker, I spent that time engineering solutions for other parts of the 
tank, that aren't adequately covered by existing products.  When the 
tank hobby gets a little larger, I'm sure that one or more of the marker 
manufacturers will develop a version that is specifically designed for 
our purposes.  In fact, I think that Steve Tyng has already been talking 
to the GTVe designer about such modifications.  Clearly, they can't make 
lots of money from such changes now, but they might do it just for fun 
or to help a fledgling hobby.

        Frank "Still Looking For A Commercial Track Assembly" Pittelli