I've had this idea in my head for a bit, and I figured it might be worth sharing (in case somebody who is a lot more clever than I am can actually make use of it)...

Here is the problem with barrel smoke in an RC tank - it comes out too slow.  The smoke from a tank gun, on the other hand, is an explosive ejection and comes out very fast.

So, the solution in my head is to actually shoot something out of the barrel.

This would require a tank with an airsoft gun.  You load it with special pellets.  These pellets are filled with a fine grey powder, and the shell is made of a weak material that will break from the force of being ejected when the gun fires.  So, when the gun fires, it's ejecting this cloud of fine grey powder that looks like an actual tank firing a shell.

Anyway, that's the thought in my head, for what it's worth.  I have no idea of how to actually engineer a weak airsoft pellet that would come apart towards the business end of the barrel (and I imagine it would add a whole bunch of barrel cleaning to tank maintenance).  But, it's an idea, and if somebody's interested who is more clever than I am, please do feel free to use it.

If the force from ejecting them will break the casing, it will break upon launching. You will have a mess in and out of the barrel and the powder may jam up the system.

If you use the actual "exploding" 6mm BB's that currently exist, they explode on impact, releasing a small cloud of powder.

The best system I ever saw for barrel smoke was a custom single piston smoker. But it was a custom machined unit that must have cost more than a Tamiya tank...

If you use narrow silicone air tube it will come out nice and fast. If you see my 1/6 M5 I think it looks pretty good.

Here is another one.

MikeC wrote:

If you use narrow silicone air tube it will come out nice and fast. If you see my 1/6 M5 I think it looks pretty good.

Neat!

Jarlath wrote:

If the force from ejecting them will break the casing, it will break upon launching. You will have a mess in and out of the barrel and the powder may jam up the system.

If you use the actual "exploding" 6mm BB's that currently exist, they explode on impact, releasing a small cloud of powder.

The best system I ever saw for barrel smoke was a custom single piston smoker. But it was a custom machined unit that must have cost more than a Tamiya tank...

So, what you're saying is that to make this happen, we need to find an overweight Scottish engineer from the future and convince him that designing and producing it will somehow save humpback whales...

(Hopefully I'm not the only one who gets this joke.)

You have to speak into the mouse, "Computer?????"

"A keyboard? How quaint!"