Doug, don't worry too much about the scale, as you will find you probably won't use it. You line SCP up with the polar scope anyway. So the scale isn't needed.
I read about the time problem in Cloudy Nights. Many complaints about the lack of 0.5 hour.
The Americans couldn't work out a fix for it, so I thought about it and used my Ozzy enginuity, and told them to put the actual time in half an hour out
They tried it and said it worked
It also has Autoguiding! Very good.
