gametechmods
Off-Topic => Real Robotics => Real Robotics Discussion => Topic started by: Vertigo on February 26, 2013, 03:58:15 PM
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Roaming Robots are now in collaboration with Robot Wars LLC and are now officially Robot Wars! The next few events will see some rebranding, including the old logo etc.
The first Robot Wars battle in over 9 years:
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=plcp&v=3BcybSn0G6g (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=plcp&v=3BcybSn0G6g#ws)
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My jaw. Someone pick it up.
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TOO MANY FLIPPERS ARGH but oh well, it was worthy of robot wars :P
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so is it going to be on tv or will i have to watch it on youtube
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Ooh, a new Toon Raider. It needs a wheelie bar though X3
Nice to see they used the old MV for the background on this fight
Also, half the video was some stupid intro. This needs to stop
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SPOILER: the actual fight starts somewhere around 2:07
will the old arena/house robots be making a return sometime in the future? or is it going to be the basic "box with hole" arena
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The old arena's been scrapped, but the house robots are ok as far as I know.
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This is a great day for robot combat. I have waited for this day so long, it is very fitting I posted series 17 Heat B today. This is something I see becoming very big once again, and may lead to televised events up here in the states. I can't wait for all this to happen. By the way, is Craig Charles still interested in hosting? :P
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Also, half the video was some stupid intro. This needs to stop
You've got to remember we're putting on a show. In a two hour long show a minute and a half intro isn't too long, and it makes it seem so much more professional to the audience.
Yes, but does the intro have to be in the YT video?
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This is excellent news.
I guess the one thing we're missing now is an arena safe enough to let more then flippers and rammers participate. At least that's my understanding of the current situation.
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Welcome back, Robot Wars. =D
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Reminds me the time when Robot Wars started. the bots weren't that big and the arena didn't have all kinds of stuff like pit, floor flipper etc.
This will be interesting, looking forward to see more.
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This is excellent news.
I guess the one thing we're missing now is an arena safe enough to let more then flippers and rammers participate. At least that's my understanding of the current situation.
I believe the other thing is if lots of spinners are allowed in more events, more bots will be destroyed, and with teams having much less money and just doing it as a hobby, repairing seems unlikely.
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At the same time, there is a major category of robots (referring to spinners, but I haven't seen any crushers or hammers at all) being disallowed from competing to begin with. You can forgo the Robot Wars arena, the house robots, as iconic as they are, but the destruction and mayhem they touted was fundamental to selling the show.
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It does seem like a bit of a catch-22 (or whatever it's called). Spinners are really needed to make the destruction that makes the show worthy of TV. But teams don't get involved because they don't know about it, because it's not on TV.
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It does seem like a bit of a catch-22 (or whatever it's called). Spinners are really needed to make the destruction that makes the show worthy of TV. But teams don't get involved because they don't know about it, because it's not on TV.
It worked out better during the economic prosperity; people could take time off from work, and credit was cheap and easy. Now we've got the recession, compounded with the fact that designs have evolved way past the point where you can build a reasonably competitive bot from a couple hundred pounds' worth of scrap and a slavaged lawnmower or electric wheelchair. I agree that they need to find some way to allow for destructive weapons, can the O2 arena be made to handle them?
Though, gettign hte word out should be no problem, the original Robot Wars was before the internet was the hulking behemoth it is today, and they managed to get the word out pretty nicely
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I'm not sure it'd be practical to be using the o2 a lot if that's part of the suggestion, it's a huge venue that I imagine is very expensive to hire out, besides, they tend to be quite busy with gigs a lot of the time. It would be good if we could go back to the salvaged wheelchair days but I'm not sure people want that..
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You think it would make it more interesting if they had some sort of spending limit while building the bot? You wouldn't have all of these $10,000+ designs for builders to compete with. If they do that, they could also film the building of the bots and make a show out of that.
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You think it would make it more interesting if they had some sort of spending limit while building the bot? You wouldn't have all of these $10,000+ designs for builders to compete with. If they do that, they could also film the building of the bots and make a show out of that.
^ this
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What's your expert opinion on a cost limit for the bots?
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Well I guess you guys do still have a lot of high damage robots...
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Exactly. Take robots like Mortis and Minion, which both cost way more than $10000 to build and maintain, and yet they hardly blew the competitions away. Cost limits will just reduce the amount of competitors, which is a bad thing.
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I believe the other thing is if lots of spinners are allowed in more events, more bots will be destroyed, and with teams having much less money and just doing it as a hobby, repairing seems unlikely.
Exactly
Just to put it into perspective, this has been our calendar of weekends for February to April:
Telford
Barnsley
Whitwick
Weekend off
Portsmouth
York
Weekend off
Gadget Show Live (UK Champs)
Colchester
Weekend off
Burgess Hill
We don't have enough time between events to be fixing robots due to spinners, or the money considering how many events there are (and therefore the amount of repairs required). For us to have spinners back, the whole format and style of events would have to change, and this has not happened. This is simply rebranding, nothing more.
For example, the whole reason the Americans still have spinners is because there are only 2 or 3 heavyweight events per year. In the UK we're likely to have around 20 events this year. Hence you can probably see from the roboteers' perspective that we prefer lots of events without spinners!
Not forgetting to upgrade one of the current heavyweight arenas to class 1 it would cost around £30,000, which the event orgranisers cannot afford.
The last reason is that we don't need spinners. The shows are now selling out pretty consistently. And that doesn't mean there is no damage anymore. To the audience Thor is pretty spectacular, and I think Tiberius causes enough damage for the shows!
Have you thought about doing a Kickstarter? I don't know what kinds of projects you're hoping to get done, but there's got to be something big that you could ask people to fund, maybe that 30k pound arena upgrade? You could use the unsold Robots Extreme Wars merch as donor prizes. (I'm assuming you work with the organizers, right?)
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The purpose of it is kind of defeated, though. You'd want a Class 1 arena for spinners, but if there's too many events to make the reintroduction of spinners sustainable in terms of repair time and money.. they'd be fine with what they have.
Ofcourse Vertigo isn't the only roboteer in the world, but the situation shouldn't be much different for a majority of active participants.
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I believe the other thing is if lots of spinners are allowed in more events, more bots will be destroyed, and with teams having much less money and just doing it as a hobby, repairing seems unlikely.
Exactly
Just to put it into perspective, this has been our calendar of weekends for February to April:
Telford
Barnsley
Whitwick
Weekend off
Portsmouth
York
Weekend off
Gadget Show Live (UK Champs)
Colchester
Weekend off
Burgess Hill
We don't have enough time between events to be fixing robots due to spinners, or the money considering how many events there are (and therefore the amount of repairs required). For us to have spinners back, the whole format and style of events would have to change, and this has not happened. This is simply rebranding, nothing more.
For example, the whole reason the Americans still have spinners is because there are only 2 or 3 heavyweight events per year. In the UK we're likely to have around 20 events this year. Hence you can probably see from the roboteers' perspective that we prefer lots of events without spinners!
Not forgetting to upgrade one of the current heavyweight arenas to class 1 it would cost around £30,000, which the event orgranisers cannot afford.
The last reason is that we don't need spinners. The shows are now selling out pretty consistently. And that doesn't mean there is no damage anymore. To the audience Thor is pretty spectacular, and I think Tiberius causes enough damage for the shows!
Have you thought about doing a Kickstarter? I don't know what kinds of projects you're hoping to get done, but there's got to be something big that you could ask people to fund, maybe that 30k pound arena upgrade? You could use the unsold Robots Extreme Wars merch as donor prizes. (I'm assuming you work with the organizers, right?)
Even if we were able to have spinners, it would still be a bad idea. Due to the situation we are in repairing after each event would be impossible, in terms of both time and cost. Eruption will have to do 7 events (around 40 fights), without any repairs whatsoever.
And we don't work with the event organisers, but we're one of the 'higher up' roboteers that go to all the events, know all the secret stuff they're doing, help them to run some of the smaller events when not many people are there and sometimes suggest stuff to them and are sometimes consulted about stuff. We don't really work with them, more help them sometimes. We knew about the negotiations with Robot Wars ages ago, and one other thing that's still a pretty big secret :P
tl;dr "My robot can't handle spinners, therefore allowing any spinners is a bad idea."
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Kinda a poor argument, considering that many builders in the US can rebuild their bot in less than 20 minutes, even with spinners in high demand.
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Perhaps the US build their robots in such a way that makes recurring maintenance and repairs simpler. Or maybe they're just better then us. x)
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I see your point Vertigo, but Hypnodisc isn't coming back any time soon, and even if you guys have lighter armor, how do you survive the axes? the Pincers? I also don't see you taking that much damage. I mean, we aren't talking about Napalm, Robogeddon, or Splinter (S4) armor. Also, in my personal opinion, Watching a bunch of flippers lump around gets boring for me after a while.
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It's not a poor argument. What you've got to realise is that our robots are built for a different purpose to those in the US. We build robots with less armour, putting more weight into powerful weapons that throw stuff around and look spectacular. US robots put a lot more weight into armour to stand up to spinners and consequently their robots (bar the spinners) are much less spectacular than ours, which is made up by the fact that the spinners are. Put our robots in a US arena and they wouldn't stand a chance. Put US robots in our arena and they wouldn't stand a chance.
And rebuilding a heavyweight in 20 minutes is a very tall order. I cannot see this being realistic.
The US has gone the way it has because robots that face spinners have to be so much tougher. Introduce spinners here and it would go the same way (spinners and boxes). Us roboteers don't think this would be a better approach!
Fair enough, I agree that as it stands today, the UK bots are more fit for TV than the US ones. Would it work to allow spinners with restrictions? For instance, Dragon Con has a hard limit of 20 ft/second tip speed, which isn't very much at a heavyweight level.
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It's not a poor argument. What you've got to realise is that our robots are built for a different purpose to those in the US. We build robots with less armour, putting more weight into powerful weapons that throw stuff around and look spectacular. US robots put a lot more weight into armour to stand up to spinners and consequently their robots (bar the spinners) are much less spectacular than ours, which is made up by the fact that the spinners are. Put our robots in a US arena and they wouldn't stand a chance. Put US robots in our arena and they wouldn't stand a chance.
And rebuilding a heavyweight in 20 minutes is a very tall order. I cannot see this being realistic.
The US has gone the way it has because robots that face spinners have to be so much tougher. Introduce spinners here and it would go the same way (spinners and boxes). Us roboteers don't think this would be a better approach!
Fair enough, I agree that as it stands today, the UK bots are more fit for TV than the US ones. Would it work to allow spinners with restrictions? For instance, Dragon Con has a hard limit of 20 ft/second tip speed, which isn't very much at a heavyweight level.
By spinners, we're talking disk spinners and bar spinners, not circular saw bots or chainsaw bots (god help anyone who tries that matilda logic), right? I'd assume you guys have the armor for circular saw bots; they really aren't that damaging.
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Hey, sparks still fly and robots still die. That's all you can really ask for.
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why dont you put some bulletproof glass or whatever in front of the audiance like the TV robot wars did
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I assume if you got a thicker, more durable net and maybe even layered it if necessary, saws shouldn't be an issue flying off?
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Do you have a schedule for this thing?
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For what?
The competition. Silly.
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When the Robot Wars events will be held.