Part 2/2
Day 2. After the one fight we had we were standing at a 100% win ratio. Not too bad for a first outing in real robotics. Our plan for the day was to spraypaint the hardox front wedge and get the weapon working.
At the end of day 1 we already painted the wedge black. As some of you know I was aiming for the hexagons that my RA2 bot Ryu Kishin had. We bought something that is usually put on gras to walk over or
something...
. We put on some orange hexes and hoped it would dry fast enough to be ready for the next fight. Spoiler: it wasn't
In the meantime we managed to get our weapon operational. But as we couldn't use our Hardoxplate we had to take out the weapon and put on the old steelplate that is so damn heavy that it almost weights half of the bot.
The first fight of the day was against team Conker. Yeah... the Crackers 'n Smash guys. I can't remember his name but he was the oldest of the team. And he is a really lovely guy. We were supposed to fight their hammerbot but that one didn't work for the rest of the weekend. So we were granted 3 points but they had another bot that was not in the tourney so we could fight that. It was a grabber and I'm sure it had a name but I really suck at remembering those. Mr. Conker came over to take messure of our hight with his indexfinger and thump. Then he walked back to his table to get the claw in the right starting position so he could get a good grab at us. I was wondering for a second... Then I grabed Kishin from the table, ran over to theirs and handed my bot over so he could actually test if the machine fit. I think he liked that.
As you may have seen: In our first fight with Kashei we had two orange stripes on one side of the bot. As we couldn't paint the thing we decided to buy some tape and have fun with that. For this fight I decided to go for classic Robot Wars and gave Kishin the SMIDSY look. Dr. Conker got a chuckle out of it. Yay!
There is no recording of that fight as far as I know but it was rather dull. Our frontwedge was so heavy that the wheels that are located in the back couldn't get any grip. we got under them a few times, they grabbed us twice. It went the full 3 minutes and it ended it a draw. As this wasn't an official fight we still didn't loose up until that point. another Yay!
Time went on and the Hardoxplate still wasn't dry. The next opponent was a horizontal spinner. and this time there was no issue with the bot. no disfunctional axe, no reserve bot. we knew we had to use the hardox plate as the steel one slowed us down way too much. We put on the lighter wedge with the paint almost dry and installed the weapon for contributing weight more towards the wheels.
We knew that this was the big one. The bots name was Hellraiser and it is one of the heavy hitters. My palms were sweatty, knees weak, arms were heavy. I was nervous. But also focused. I know I had to face him with the plate at all times. Push him around and finish that fight as quickly as possible.
Watch the Video first!
Holy crap! That one was scary. I couldn't get a good hold on him as I tried to pit him. you can see our lifting arm moving once we were on the left side of the wall. Shortly after he hit it and that was the end of our weapon for that tourney. something on the motor broke off but I can't remember what it was. After the plate got ripped off I was bailing for the pit. I drove there to see if he would come over to drive in. but he didn't I realised then that his one side stopped working. the new plan was to shove the piece of hardox into him to have him highcenterd. but I waited to long and I got my self stuck in the very last second. This fight was expensive in regards of parts. 4 shockmounts where killed in action. the plate was bend on one corner. screws lost their heads. bolts as well. the aluminiumsides had big gashes in them. the afformentioned weaponmotor was dead, and when we opend up the bot we found out that the shockmounts (4 per drive motor) had recived damage as well. we lost 4 of them. no replacements tho... time to pack our things and go home. That was the thought at that point.
Oh... did I mention that we won that fight against Hellraiser and that we were still undefeated yet? 3 wins makes 9 points in the scoring system.
9 points sounded good enough. there was no way we could get the bot back in fighting form.
We already uninstalled the speedcontroller, had given back the remote and the link. And then there it was: the magic thing about robot combat: People came and helped us out. gave us tips how to fix the bot for the last fight of the day. we were on it. we replaced some shockmounts with hdpe and swapped a few of the still functioning ones around, reinstalled everything ( except for the weapon cause: RIP) and there it was. Kishin was alive again. Kinda. We were unstoppable! Nothing could beat us!
We had to fight another spinner...
sh**.
It was team Conker again. I think it's name ws Binky. I saw a fight they were in before and there was no spinning involved. I went over to their table and asked if the spinner was working at all. the answer was yes. they just wanted to have a longer fight before so they didn't spin it up.
Double sh**.
at this point Kishin was not quite ready yet and we were still uncertain if we could make it til the fight. We finished it like 10 minutes before we had to go to the arena for the last one. Again: no fotage but this one was quite nice. we outwedged them a few times, they spun up their weapon and got a good cut. at one point they had us between their... thingies at the front so I tried to squeeze in, make their spinner hit our wedge and turn themselfs on their back. it didn't happen. What did happen was Binky shutting down. Something it did through the whole tournament. I tried to get it into the pit in time as I knew it would come back to life in a few seconds. I couldn't do it. (Note to my seld: work on the pushing power) Binky came back and it started driving forward towards the pit. it turned around and fell down.
we won... not in a nice way but we won!
12 Points (Out of 18... remember?). That means we (basicly) won every fight we actually attended. I couldn't be more proud. This was a great weekend. A great first tournament and we met so many great people.
I'm already working on some new stuff for the next version of Kishin. It's supposed to be even more like it's RA2 counterpart. We will see how things turn out this time.
Thanks for reading this overly long article
-Thy