Frequently Asked Questions

We are a Big Guns R/C Warship Combat Club serving members in Virginia and the surrounding states. we currently have members in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. We have several battle sites throughout the region - as far west as Roanoke, Virginia and as far east as Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Simply put we build remote control (R/C) warship models, arm them with CO² powered cannons, and sink each other in hotly contested battles. Yes, the cannons really do punch holes in the ships. Yes, the ships really do sink. However, the ships are designed for this type of abuse and are easily recovered and repaired.

Come to a meet!

The best thing you can do is come to a meet. No matter how many pictures we take, or blog posts we write, their simply is no substitute for seeing things first hand. Meets are annouced ahead of time on our homepage.

Sign up for an account

You can sign up for an account on this site. If you do then you can post questions to our forums and comments and questions to the various blog posts, pictures, etc. on the site.

Email Us

While we prefer to be contacted through the site we know that does not work for everyone. You can also email editor@mabg.org for more information. Please use a meaningful subject in your email so it does not get filtered as spam.

The boats definately sink and it is not at all expensive. We build the ships with the expectation they will be sunk repeatedly. The internal hardware is laid out so that the rounds don't break anything important and we've got lots of tricks for how to clean up and repair sunken ships.  with a little rubbing alcolhol and some masking tape you are back on the water.

That is not to say that the equipment does not wear out from time to time. Certainly servos and motors go bad just like in any R/C boat. Sometimes a sinking is enough to push a failing part over the edge. On the whole though a sinking is more dramatic than tramatic.

You can upload images up that are no larger than five megabytes. Be warned that large images will be scaled down once they are received (see below)

To save space images are scaled down to sizes that are large enough to look nice on a computer screen but not necessarily large enough to print.

The site will scale your images to be no larger than 1024x768. So that is probably the best size to choose. However, any larger image with a height:width ratio 3:4 should work fine.

Previews are all scaled to 800x600. This is the size of the image most of the places it is displayed. If the original is smaller than that then the original image is used as the preview.

Thumbnails are scaled to 160x120.

The most recent picture that has been edited by the poster (not considering comments)

Images in Gallery

You can add images to the gallery by creating content. This is jus like creating most other content for the site. You can is the menu to the left to 'Create content' and then select 'Image'. You will then be presented with a form that allows you to enter a short title, select the image you want to upload, choose the gallery or galleries it belongs in, and enter a long description.

In the above screen shot the title that will appear for the image is 'Nassau Afloat'. The image will be displayed in the galleries for Nassau and Social Events. If you click on the browse button you will be provided with an OS/browswer specific dialog for selecting the image on your machine. The 'Body' is the long description that will be shown if people opt to see the image details.

Please Be Polite

There is some etiquette to keep in mind when uploading images. First of all select one of the bottom level galleries. For example, don't choose to place pictures in 'Events'; instead place them in one of the sub-galleries 'Battles and Target Practices' or 'Social Events'. This is really important if the galleries are to remain functional.

Please don't post separate similar pictures to the galleries. Instead, post the picture that best represents the collection. Then in the body for that picture add the related images. This basically creates a mini-gallery represented by the one picture. This allows everyone to share the roatating images on the front page. This is described in 'Attaching Images to Content' below.

You can see some examples here, here and here. In each case only the top image shows up in  the gallery - the rest of the images show up when someone looks at the original image.

Attaching Images to Content

As mentioned earlier you can also add images to the body of blog posts, images, coments, etc. You can select images recently uploaded to the galleries or upload custom images for this content. I will walk through the steps below

First, click the 'Insert/Edit Image button.

You will then be presented with a blank image properties dialog. Note this dialog allows you to use images from other hosts. However, these examples will assume you want an image hosted by our site.

If you click the 'Browse Server' button you will be presented with a dialog showing recently uploaded images.

If you have not yet uploaded the image then you can select 'Quick Upload' to upload a new image. After selecting a file from your local host You will see a dialog like this one:

Generally, you will want the 'Image Preset' to be thumbnail and the 'Link' to be 'Preview'. The term preview is misleading - it means the larger 800x600 image size used by the galleries. However, if you want to display t he larger image in the body of your content you can select preview for the 'Image Preset' (as I did in the above example)

You will then return to a filled in image properties dialog. From there you can change the border around the image, its displayed size, etc.