Robotwars
SERIES 5 - SERIES 6 - EXTREME II - SERIES 7
Robotwars Series 7
Series 7 was filmed at RAF NEWTON near Nottingham (as Series 6 and Extreme 2)
Friday 22nd August Qualifiers Day 1
Saturday 23rd August Qualifiers Day 2 See pictures
Sunday 24th August
Monday 25th August Heats A and B - Afternoon Call
Tuesday 26th August Record Day 1 -
Wednesday 27th August Record Day 2
Thursday 28th August Record Day 3
Friday 29th August Record Day 4
Saturday 30th August Record Day 5
Sunday 31st August Record Day 6
13BLACK is seeded number 7, there are 16 seeds this year.
We were in Heat D, 16 heats (A-L) followed by 2 8way semi finals and a grand final.
Our first fight was Round 1 of heat D.
We were up against Herbinator, Lightning and The Alien.
To set the stage for this first fight it is necessary to read the intro on the `qualifying` page, to say the robot wasn`t quite set up would be fairly accurate ;-)
Herbinator was a flipper, Lightning was a side flipper which I think is the only flipper built that way and The Alien had a rotating hammer.
The match started off fairly quickly and I immediately noticed how slow the drive acceleration was on 13Black, not too much of a problem as the discs spun up quite well. We made our first attack against Herbinator and put a nice gash in the back about 12 inches long, going clean through a chassis member at the same time. Straight after that Lightning got underneath them and pushed them to the side of the arena on their side, they didn`t move .
A bit of a free for all followed and it was difficult to get any real hits, Lightning started to shove us around a bit managing to get underneath quite easily, eventually we hit The Alien with so much force we lifted ourselves into the air and did a complete 360 before driving off, as we pulled away we noticed smoke coming from the inside of our robot, pretty soon everyone noticed the smoke as there seemed to be quite alot of it! actually we have cooling fans fitted to each speed controller and these were blowing all the smoke out of the top of the body. Panic set in and I lost concentration on what the others were doing, there wasn`t any power in the robot and it seemed like we were going out in the first round. As quickly as it had started the smoke stopped and power came back, just then The Alien came smack into the side of us and their hammers hit us fairly hard but the body is a very durable design so we took it quite well, unfortunately for The Alien they seemed to have immobilised themselves.
At this point the Herbinator had been counted out and Shunt was hitting them with his axe and pushing them into the wall.
With just us and Lightning
left we were confident of going through to the second round but didn`t want to
take any chances, so I thought we`d have a go at Lightning
if nothing more than to get some aggression points, everything counts! during
this endgame it was really noticeable how slow the drive was running with the
new Iskra motors and they were in real need of setting up properly. We had
trouble chasing Lightning
and they managed to turn and push us sideways into the arena wall - our discs
were up to speed and when we hit the macrolon wall it shattered, 12mm thick and
it just shattered! (we were given two large pieces of it after the fight as
souvenirs!)
Lightning then wedged
us up against the wall on our side and I immediately used the new self righting
arm to bring us back down - unfortunately it didn`t do anything. God knows how
many trials and hours were put into it and it just sat there! b****d thing.
Herbinator managed to get going again while this was on and we watched them run around for a bit until the end of the fight.
After the fight we were reunited with the robot and interviewed by Jane, she asked us what went wrong and we said we honestly didn`t know why the arm didn`t work and we`d have to strip it down. The smoke was a worry and we guessed it might be related but at least we had got through, more by luck than anything else (but luck plays a BIG part in the arena as certain of our previous encounters know too well!)
In the pits we lifted the body off to survey the damage - there were several burnt out wires and these lead to the self righter relays. The relays were mounted under the front disc, when we hit The Alien the high shock load had closed all the relays simultaneously, causing a short circuit and setting fire to the wiring, as soon as the wires had burned through the current stopped, leaving us with power again.
Further inspection revealed that all the speed controller mounting posts had sheard on the horizontally mounted boards, right at the bottom of the drive assembly, leaving loose high current pcbs floating around and aluminium box! how close we came to total melt down we shall never know, but it took 12 solid hours to fix them back in and build yet another self righting circuit (see qualifying pages!)
The opposing heat consisted of Thor,
Hydra, Gravity
and Hodof the Bad.
Out of these Gravity
and Thor came through.
Second Round.
There were two possible robots that we had to fight, Thor, a well known hammer robot and Gravity, a flipper from Holland that had gained a strong reputation during qualifying (well you would if you`d thrown a 100kg robot higher than any other robot had done before - with the possible exception of Wheely Big Cheese)
We personally thought we`d get to fight Thor as we`d fought a flipper in the first round and also we thought the producers would want to see a 13Black v Gravity heat final should we both make it through (their minds work like that you know)
So anyway we ended up with Gravity as our next opponent, we had a good look round the robot itself and said hello to the team. There were some nice weak points as long as we could get round the back and avoid the flipper. So we were fairly optimistic.
Along came the fight and we drove into the arena, we had devised a tactic we were gong to use but we seemed to be awfully close together, the countdown started and I waited till activate was said before powering the discs up (we got a telling off for starting early in Extreme 2). Unfortunately the spin up speed just wasn`t quick enough and Gravity got under us before we had chance to really do anything, the next instant we were airborne and came down hard on the self righter arm, ending up upside down. I tried the self righter and it did nothing, again! That was it really, from that point onward all we could do was stand and watch, which was fun really. Gravity first pushed us into the CPZ, Sir Killalot came along and picked us up and proudly held us aloft, I then powered the discs up and it looked pretty good - "stop your discs we daren`t put you down" came a message! so I left them a bit longer just for the hell of it until boredom got the better of it and turned them off. He put us back down upside down and Gravity came in again, Sir K drove in front and nearly got tipped himself, he then picked us back up and put us down the right way up! Gravity came back round before I had managed to get my bearings and flipped us again, when we hit the floor we landed on one of the discs and we bounced over the arena wall and were finally out for good.
We all cheered when we went over the wall and although we would obviously like to have got through to the heat final it was obvious that Gravity was one serious contender and we would have done well if we had beaten them (we havn`t beaten a flipper yet!)
Back in the pits we again took the robot apart to try and find out what happened and all the self righter mechanism was jammed, caused by landing on the arm, added to that the main centre axle had been pushed up into the body when we had hit the concrete floor going out of the arena. This had dislodged the wheel from the drive and the whole subframe had twisted to boot. It would take a lot to fix before fighting again and when we were asked if we wanted to fight in the World Championships or similar fights later that week we reluctantly said no, we really had had enough of working on the robot.
So from seed number 7 to going out in the second round it wasn`t one of our better results but it was good fun - maybe not as much as series 6 but we will certainly be back for series 8, big changes are already planned but if this series showed us anything it`s just how far the robotwars technology is now progressing. Chaos 2 was the first robot to flip another out of the arena and it was ground breaking, now it happens nearly every fight, once impenetrable arena walls now shatter with the force coming from disc weapons and armour is being developed that would be at home on the battlefield!