Clark Board TK80

[Rubicon99]

So it is OK to upgrade the setup in your tank as long as you approaches the leader to inform him while the rest of the tanks in battle did not know anything about your intention? Funny!
And If I remember correctly, the Tamiya Pershing ran faster than my Jagdpanzer IV after receiving 5 hits. And that was OK too???
I play for fun with my newly painted and assembled tanks. Out of 8-10 battles we played on the day, my tanks got knocked out 80% of the time before the battle was over. So I am not as "serious" with the intention to break the rule to win.
I posted my view from what I saw at the battle and how I saw other players played. If you saw my playing was inappropriate and just picked on me, that's acceptable too. I can reset my tanks so it will be slower than your Pershing and Haojie's tank too, LOL.

Haojie is an anomaly and he is mostly there to test and sell products. Even with the speed of his “space” tanks they are easily taken out, unlike your HL IFA tanks. Without him and I working together and me pushing him, the industry would NOT HAVE LegoDEI receivers for HL tanks as he had NO INTENTION of ever making them. His focus was only Tamiya and Clark.

Yes David I targeted your IFA tank. I had tacit blessing to do so because a number of veteran people myself including pointed your tank out specifically. There were others, but their tanks were not as bad as yours or when spoken to by other veteran player they corrected their tanks or removed them from the field. When you were approached by myself and others you “blew us off” and took no noticeable corrective action. So in effect you were warned leaving no other course of action but to be shown what it is like to fight against your IFA tank.

Once you were taken out of the battle I immediately called my tank as dead and actions with it stoped. I also DID NOT shoot at anyone else because that would not have been fair to them. The lesson was for you not them.

The HL “6C-LP” rule is to balance with Tamiya/Clark damage speed reduction. Tamiya IS faster at start but HL IS faster at the end. Both have a period of time when they have the advantage. This has proven to be a fair balance over the entirety of a battle. If a HL tank is run in high power it has a HUGE advantage over the Tamiya/Clark systems. In fact myself and others running solo HL tanks could take out almost an entire field of Tamiya tanks with a HL in high power and disregarding the firing count. We have done so in a numbers test battles with other veteran tankers. How do you think the rules for HL tanks came to be. Without strict adherence to them HL tanks would not be allowed on the field during battles with Tamiya, Clark or others.

HL tanks capable of battling with Tamiyas have only been around a few years. It was at LA and San Diego clubs long before you were around the hobby that the work was put in to make 6.0+ HL tanks truly able to even be used in club battles. There are clubs that have watched us and seeing our success have started to allow HL tanks to participate in their battles using the 6C-LP rule. Without that rule it just does not work.

To address the fast Pershing. My Tamiya Pershing is actually slower then the average HL tank set on High Power so when put into Tamiya “test mode” it will take hits but not slow down, just like a HL tank and becomes very difficult if next to impossible to fight against, just like your HL IFA tanks. Kinda sucks fighting against a tank that does not play by the rules is the lesson you are not seeing. Most people see and quickly change to following the rules.

If you were having issue early on before I switch to the “teaching tank” with others (myself included) that lead you to dumping the rules, you said NOTHING to ANYONE so corrective action could be take. Instead you on your own changed the rules for your tanks thus causing even a bigger issue and the entire problem spiraling more out of control.

David I do not think you intend to cheat with your IFA tanks, in fact I think you have great potential in them if you just tweak them a little to be more in compliance with Tamiya IFA tank standards vs them being more HL. I think you are just a little inexperienced at setting up an IFA tank for battling and testing throughly outdoors to ensure fairness in receiving hits. Just blocking the Apple on an IFA is not enough to call it good to go. The performance is very differently with a LegoDEI then with a Tamiya receiver. The LegoDEI is far to restrictive and this effects other players who have tanks set up properly and expect the same performance envelop as they would be facing with a block IFA Tamiya receiver. An IFA tank should be able to receive frontal hit starting at 10ft and be easily hit at 5ft. Yours were not taking frontal hit past 3ft and even less. You were told about this by others but.......

Unfortunately the way your HL LegoDEI IFA tanks are now is reminiscent of the way others in the past deliberately set theirs up to gain an unfair advantage. But then you would not have known this. So now that you know, myself and other hope you take the corrective actions needed to make your IFA tanks more inline to what is expected by everyone if you wish to use them in club battles.

I know it’s hard not to take this personally. I would not be waisting my time with this if I did not see your potential to be a great RC tank builder and battler. I just do not want to see you fall into the realm of the mediocre tanker when you have so much potential to be a leader in the hobby. I hope by telling you bluntly that you can step back and see the issue from other people’s prospective and then move forward with maybe a better understanding.

[DavidN]

Thank you for the lesson Professor! For your information, I tested my tank destroyers before sending them to battle. They received hits and flashed their receiver lights at 10 feet. The president of the LA club lives 5 minutes from me. My first battle IFA tank was his tank. I used his IFA tank for measuring distance and taping as a guideline.

But if you stated that other members complained about my tank destroyers not getting hits, I don't recall anyone approached me on the issue. At one time, one member came to me during the battle and asked why my HL tank destroyer did not flash when she shot me. I smiled and told her that my tank destroyer did not receive her shot because it was knocked out of action already. She laughed.

It is quite odd. So far I only played 2 battles using my HL Jagdpanther out of the 8 battles we played that Saturday in February. I played the HL Jagpanzer IV in the afternoon for the Axis/Allies battle early this month. Those were the only 2 times I used the HL IFA tanks for battle out of the 7 months I attended . Those other tank destroyers I brought were to drive around. They were not involved in the action. From just that and I deserved so much attention

Ok! if other members stated, it must be true. But I also know about my tanks too. I will put my HL tanks in low speed settings and retest them again before our battle in May.

[Rubicon99]

Thank you for the lesson Professor! For your information, I tested my tank destroyers before sending them to battle. They received hits and flashed their receiver lights at 10 feet. The president of the LA club lives 5 minutes from me. My first battle IFA tank was his tank. I used his IFA tank for measuring distance and taping as a guideline.

But if you stated that other members complained about my tank destroyers not getting hits, I don't recall anyone approached me on the issue. At one time, one member came to me during the battle and asked why my HL tank destroyer did not flash when she shot me. I smiled and told her that my tank destroyer did not receive her shot because it was knocked out of action already. She laughed.

It is quite odd. So far I only played 2 battles using my HL Jagdpanther out of the 8 battles we played that Saturday in February. I played the HL Jagpanzer IV in the afternoon for the Axis/Allies battle early this month. Those were the only 2 times I used the HL IFA tanks for battle out of the 7 months I attended . Those other tank destroyers I brought were to drive around. They were not involved in the action. From just that and I deserved so much attention

Ok! if other members stated, it must be true. But I also know about my tanks too. I will put my HL tanks in low speed settings and retest them again before our battle in May.

You are welcome for the lesson. You can clap the erasers and serve your detention after school......Professor Rubicon

[DavidN]

LegoDEI made these IFA IR receiver sunshades just for me to use interchangeably on my Stugs and Jagds. If I receive complaints again about my IFA on our next battle, I will ask LegoDEI to give my $ back, lol.

[Rubicon99]

LegoDEI made these IFA IR receiver sunshades just for me to use interchangeably on my Stugs and Jagds. If I receive complaints again about my IFA on our next battle, I will ask LegoDEI to give my $ back, lol.

God bless Lego, but he is not great at testing the effectiveness of his own products in actual field use. San Diego club members have tested this type of set up and it did not equal the performance of the Tamiya set up. It tended to be much harder to hit which unbalanced the IFA intended purpose. That and the supposed rule change to IFA tanks coming for the LA Club and San Diego Club jointly switching to the twisted/45 off set IR receivers will renders them all but useless and they will need to be removed before play. This has been a long time coming and has been asked for by a large majority of club members well before the COVID closures.

But these do look promising for the proposes new class of tanks that will be taking the fields soon. The Cold War and Modern tank class are getting the new Armor Invincibility Modern “AIM” upgrades that better simulate today’s advanced protection that make them only vulnerable to rear turret section hits when fighting against WW2 era tanks. When fighting other Cold War and Modern tanks they will revert back to 360 shades.

Should balance everything out quite well, make the games faster, with more maneuvering which should encourage the younger players to stay involved longer.

[RichJohnson]

I got this tank from the president of the LA club. This is how he taped it.

This is one of my favorite tanks that he built. And I dont say that lightly as I hate German tanks.
It works so well because the tank is scale speed and the tamiya apple is blocked properly with tape that has been painted.


Sadly these LegoDEI IR receiver caps will not work as they are improperly blocked with thick plastic. I bet you did not know this.... The proper way the IFA block was applied was with black electrical tape. At a distance the IR beam cannot pass through the electrical tape, but closer in at 10 - 5 feet the IR floods through the black electrical tape and the tank can take a hit straight on from the front. Sometimes depending on brand of tape, one to three layers could be required to properly block a tamiya apple. Testing each roll on application by shooting it with a tank was necessary.
These Lego shade caps being blocked with plastic the tank will not take a hit at all directly from the front so they would be considered improper to use and sadly useless.




The other problem we have found previously with LegoDEI receivers is that they have different angles than the Tamiya apple being that they have 4 IR receivers, one on each side while tamiya has one with a 4 sided inverse pyramid. Blocking a tamiya is relatively less blocked than blocking a whole IR receiver on the LEgo unit. Also, LegoDEI has offered now a couple different shades with different fins inside them at different angles which further complicates the IR pattern of reception and also muddles up the workings on regular turreted henglong tanks if they use a 45 degree shade cap on a 90 degree base, they then are effectively using the old TFA or tamiya twisted apple pattern. Some of our members have accidentally stumbled into this and I informed them when I figured it out.

Our last LA Tank meet battles were pretty decent. I liked the axis v allies event. I appreciate an all Olive drab unit fighting big cats. But there were problems that developed that descended into charlie foxtrot. Your IFA tank toward the end was only one of the frustrating events that afternoon.
One member had just programed his clark panzer and it had some kind of glitch which I didnt learn about till halfway through the day and it pissed me off. He said it was a glitch he will fix but what it was doing was it would take one hit and apparently totally stall out for a couple minutes. I would think it was knocked out, then out of nowhere it would deliver control back to him and he would begin battling, often shooting me point blank to which I shouted hey I thought you were knocked out and he said oh no that was just the glitch on the first shot. It got me a bit heated as it happened a couple times till I was not stupid and caught on and just treated that tank as live the whole time. Had it been in San Diego I would have told him take it off the field, its not reliable. We cannot have unreliable models engaging on the field and confusing people. But that was not my call, he has more clout there than I do.

Another member likes to mount his apples on the rear of his IFA tanks, totally behind the super structure of the casemate making them impossible to hit at all unless your broadside or rear of the tank. His other tank, a turreted panzer, had the IR apple behind the turret on a little tab. It was literally the stupidest thing I have ever seen done to an RC battle tank. I really got pissed off when I saw that as I had been shooting at him constantly thinking he had the apple in the TC hatch with his little Panzer Girl figure on top of the apple, but no he had just his Panzer Girl in the TC hatch and the apple behind the turret. I talked with him about how unfair that kind of set up is and how he could think that was ok but it was more important he have his Anime Panzer girl up there and a laser tag target, oh just hide that behind the tank. Heck why bother to have an IR apple at all......
That set me off to have a talk with the club leadership. He is apparently such a terribly skilled battler that the club president has let him get away with the IFA tank having its apple in the back until now and this was a first debut of the panzer with the anime girl and the rear mounted apple, but I made the case in arguments that this just cannot be allowed and it must be rebuilt for conformity to the rules.
IF you cant play with the same rules as everyone else there is no fairness and then everyone will start to leverage angles outside the rules.

We went to alot of time and trouble testing ways to make the Henglong tanks acceptable with the Tamiya and (other like) tank models our clubs have. Those that have them spent alot of money on them as you know, you now have several of these fine models and you can see what they are over the more toy like feeling of the henglong tanks. The henglong since they came out had to change out their boards or add in makko boards to be able to play with tamiyas and be accepted. The 6.0 was revolutionary but still lacked hit reception reliability until LegoDEI converted his Clark product for henglong use at the hounding of Rubicon99 with some kind input from the rest of the group.
The 6second LP rule was developed to even the playing field and make the HL tanks compete more fairly with the Tamiya type tanks.
You may not have understood or for other reading this airing of our clubs dirty laundry, the 6 second count is you counting to 6 before you fire your tank again, aka the reload time just like tamiya using a 3,5or9 hit count and reload count. The the low power mode is to manuever on an even field with the tamiyas. The HL tanks are much faster than their real life counterparts while the tamiyas are not. The tamiya tanks slow down as they take hits, the henglong do not. But with the henglong tanks fixed in low power mode, they start off at a slight disadvantage over a tamiya until a tamiya recieves its first hit, which slows it down by half its speed. Now, very like the henglong in low power is probably faster than most tamiya tanks after their first hit, and then its just down hill slower from that point onward. So after one or two hits are received by the tamiya, the henglong now has a constant compounding advantage over the tamiya tanks with every hit the tamiya receives.
We have proven this fact time and time again that with this scenario, the henglong still has a bigger advantage over the tamiya and an experienced battler can exploit it to deadly consequences against tamiya type tanks. But it the best way we currently can level out the henglong tanks and have them accepted by the legacy of the tamiya type tanks.

The only problems with this occur when people set up a tank with a 90 degree base and then put a LegoDEI receiver in now creating a 45 degree receiver or not following the 6sec LP rule.

I hope this explains the history and theory of how the IFA works for everyone and how when not set up properly it can just upset everyone around playing against an improperly set up tank.

I did have some discussions with the LA club leadership as I would really like to see the IFA go away and change to the 45 degree apple instead. Its a little easier to police and regulate as well as just as effective at long range with varying results close in around 6 to 4 feet based on tests depending on apple brand.

[oldwolf]

Ah, it was all so much simpler as a kid back in the ‘50s when my friends and I set up our Aurora and Revell tank models on opposite sides of the lawn ad threw acorns at them. Acorns make such a nice plonking sound bouncing off styrene!

Seriously, I hope you all keep working out the kinks in the rules system you are developing. I think you are actually getting an excellent system put together. Maybe in the long run, if you send them a complete, documented and tested rule set, either Tamiya or Henglong will produce a new mfu version that closely supports it. Stranger things have happened.

[DavidN]

Thank you RJ for taking the time to type in a great informative post. I now have a very clear understanding about the front blocking on IFA subject. The terms in your lecture was much nicer than my last professor :-) I will switch over to the electrical tape, test them again and toss the LegoDEi shades into the trash bin. I will share the history, the reasons, and the proper installation to others or the new members. See you all again on May 14 for the better prepared and more fun tank battles :-)