Never did get around to building a Battlebot... Simply didn't have the time or spare cash, and hauling a 300-pound 'bot and 250 pounds of tools, spares, batteries and chargers to California and staying in a hotel for a week to 12 days was just way too expensive for this unsponsored po'boy.
I'd still like to, and I'll be happy to provide whatever help I can to anyone local (meaning Alaska in general) who wants to, but my payin' customers come first, hobbies second.
I had a few ideas over the years, some of which I thought were okay, some I realized
wouldn't work even before I got 'em penciled in, and one or two I saw someone else
build something vaguely similar... I did manage to find a couple of my old pencil
drawings and scan 'em to show what I had in mind, at least for a short while.
This
first one I was going to call "EarthQuake"...
I figured EarthQuake would be apt, as the steel-stud rollers would "rumble"
like nobody's business on the steel floor of the BattleBox. The plan was to have
it a relatively high-speed rammer, fully invertible, and front-rear modular. IE,
the front yoke/roller could be either inverted or simply turned around and used as
the rear roller, meaning one spare setup could be used at either end. It was to steer
by bending in the middle, like a big Cat earthmover.
I figured a couple of
MagMotors, some BattlePacks and some big honkin' steel tube, and Curt wanted to run
something like a 9600-baud wireless modem LAN arrangement with laptop controllers...
I even wanted a little yellow rotating beacon like on heavy equipment.
The
main drawback? No weapon. I wanted invertibility, so there was no easy way to add
an active weapon like a hammer or spike, and as a rammer, well, there was nothing
to "ram" with. The huge rollers would have just rolled over darn near any
other 'Bot, doing little damage other than maybe scratching a little paint. It would
have looked cool, but it would have been very hard to win with.
This later design was instead built around an active weapon. I wanted a spinner,
but I also wanted something different. So I scaled down a "Nightmare" type
vertical wheel, turned it into a composite "hammerwheel" like Minion
uses (a built disc with weights at the outside to maximize MOI) and put it in a snowplow
type pusher wedge. To add a little bidirectionality, I laid another wheel down flat
a'la MOE and stuck it out back.
This one would have been a little more
competitive, but I'd have my weight split between two weapons and drives, and probably
going up against 'Bots that had ALL their weight and power in a single weapon. It
would have been okay, I think, against wedges or some pushybots, though the two-wheel
drive meant that some weight would be on skids or casters, and not on the drive
wheels. So it wouldn't be as good in a strict pushing contest.
It also lost
it's invertibility, so I'd have to budget weight for some sort of self-righting mechanism
And the last one for which I have a drawing (yes, it's scribbled on the back of a "George Carlin" page-a-day calendar): An obvious ripoff of two good 'Bots: The body of Nightmare and the hammer-rotor of Son of Whyachi. Nothing spectacular or original, though it would be pretty easy to make. Personally, I'd make the frame of either aluminum panels and welded, or welded tubular 4140 and heat-treated. An Etek motor to drive the rotor- about 12 hp- some BattlePacks for power, some NPC gearboxes for the drive wheels... Shamelessly copy Whyachi's rotor construction- why not, it works- right down to the pointy "meat tenderizer" hammers, and since we're burning money over an open flame, an IFI controller.
I also had some of the usual ideas: A full-body spinner like Mauler, Phrisbee
or Moebius, a flipper like Toro or The Matador (I do know a
thing or two about pneumatics...) or a blade-spinner like MOE or Kneebreaker.
None of which are entirely outside my capabilities- at least, i'd like to think :)
- but the costs of building, travelling and competing are simply staggering for this
unsponsored, doing-all-the-work-myself, garage-shop Alaska boy...