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BattleBots Day 4, Sun, 27 May 2001

Hello Everyone,

I hope you are not getting bored with hearing the same thing over and over again: Team Regan Designs had a successful day at BattleBots! We had 2 bouts scheduled in which we posted 2 wins. At the end of day 4, Team Regan Designs has won 8 out of 8 bouts. T-Wrex is now in the top 8 in the middleweights, while Omega-13 is in the top 16 in the heavy weights.

The day started with Alain and T-Wrex taking on last year's runner up "Bad Attitude". The driver of Bad Attitude was considered the best middleweight driver in the tournament. He lost last year's final by getting stuck under the spike strips after solidly walloping his opponent. This year he was the odds on favorite. The two bots were evenly matched with neither having any visible weaknesses that the other could exploit to achieve a knockout. Barring a lucky break, the outcome of the bout would hinge on one thing alone -- driving skill. Early in the bout Bad Attitude was able to toss T-Wrex a couple of times but was unable to flip it (not that it would make a difference). About a minute into the bout, Alain was able to deliver a solid tail-whack which flipped Bad Attitude on its back. While Bad Attitude could still move, it no longer had a ramp with which it could flip T-Wrex. Both bots spent the rest of the bout chasing each other around the arena and butting heads and tails. In the end, Alain was able to land a lot more hits and tail whacks, resulting in T-Wrex being declared the winner by a score of 24 to 21. Picture 1 shows Bad Attitude after the bout. Picture 2 is a close up of Bad Attitude’s ramp, showing the teeth damaged by T-Wrex’s Titanium armor. Pictures 3 and 4 show damage to Bad Attitude’s 2024-T3 Aluminum chassis by T-Wrex’s teeth and tail.
What would you call the driver who out-drives the best driver in the class? Once again, the judges and lots of competitors came over to commend Alain on his driving skill. When the bout began, the camera crew asked Alain "How do you feel about beating up an old man?" (The driver of Bad Attitude is a senior citizen) Alain's impromptu response was a highlight of the tournament: "I am wondering how he would feel about being beaten by a 14 year old?" You can count on seeing that response and this bout on a TV screen near you. Once again, Alain managed to completely avoid the spike strips, the screw and the hammer, but did get his first taste of the kill saws. The two visits to the kill saws resulted in large showers of sparks and some damage to T-Wrex's armor, which Brent promptly hammered and welded out.

Later in the day (actually at 9:15 at night) Brent and Omega-13 went against another new bot called B.O.B. (Basher Of Bots). BOB was a box with a spinning circular disk on its front face. For this bout, Brent took out the middle spikes on Omega-13 and replaced them with a cut down steel plate. After dancing around the arena for a bit and delivering a few blows, Brent took on BOB head on. The hit to the steel plate broke one of the teeth in BOB's spinning disk, making it unbalanced. After a subsequent hit either the motor failed or the disk was shut down by the operator. Brent continued to pound the defenseless BOB inflicting significant damage to the exterior, but failing to disable the bot. The judges scored the bout 15 to 30, which is a lot less one sided than the fight appeared to my biased eyes. There were only a few glancing visits to the kill saws resulting in no visible damage to Omega-13. In a show of poor sportsmanship, the team wheeled B.O.B. right from the competition to their truck, loaded it up and left. They did not want the severely disfigured bot seen or photographed or talk to anyone. They declined a TV interview and did not honor an arrangement with us to have post fight pictures taken.

Even though there was no visible damage, towards the end of the bout, Omega-13 appeared sluggish. Post-fight check revealed two of the motors acting very erratically. Oh no, the motor problems strike again. We resigned ourselves to a long night in the pits rebuilding motors. But this did not look like the usual motor problem; it felt more like a radio problem. A little more investigation revealed that the connector on one of the radios was unreliable and wiggling the connector fixed the problem. Did I ever tell you that both Brent and I HATE connectors. After the radio problem was fixed, the motors appeared fine. Hopefully the last set of fixes we implemented this morning have fixed the problem for the duration of the tournament. Tomorrow we will replace the connector and the cable. One unanswered question does remain: The system was designed as a triple redundant system and the cable failure should have been caught by the backup system or the backup to the backup system. We will leave the investigation of that question for a later date and just fix the cable and live with it for tomorrow.

Talking about tomorrow, it is turning out to be a very hectic day. So far we have 4 bouts scheduled: Omega-13 3'rd round, T-Wrex quarterfinals, Omega-13 rumble, T-Wrex rumble. If the bots win all their bouts, we are also looking at semifinals and finals for T-Wrex, and quarterfinals, semifinals and finals for Omega-13. That makes for potentially 9 bouts in 12 hours on a single day, as opposed to 8 bouts over 4 days so far. In anticipation of this, Alain is already in bed and sleeping like a log. I need to follow his lead.

Until the final update tomorrow night...

Hamid