Our aim with the kits was simple; make something that can hold its own in the arena. We figured that the easiest way to achieve that was to bring them as close to the weight limit as possible. Robots that are several kilos underweight going into a fight are going to struggle to make any impact on the battle, or even another robot, especially if they only have drill-powered drives and no weapon. So by making our kits as close to 13.6kg as is reasonably possible, they'll stand a better chance of being able to fight on an even keel.

It's an aim that has so far been met. One of the kits managed to push Cicatrix backwards during testing, and it was out-pushing Carcinus in a mini-battle at the weekend - so far so good. There is still about 2kg of weight spare as well, so take one of the beefy batteries out and you've got plenty of weight for a weapon and armour.

The issues that arose at the weekend are easily fixable with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm going to grab a couple of bits that should help minimise any repeats. I'm currently totting up how much it cost to make the kits to try and determine a rough retail price. We're hoping to keep the cost down as much as possible so that it's not too expensive a jump for someone starting out. The kit will most likely start out as just a rambot, but the plan is to develop two or three different weapons packages to make available for anyone wanting to upgrade.

Tech-wise there's not a huge amount of special stuff in there. It's your standard drill-box pusher, with Botbitz controllers being our current ESC of choice. Just as simple as it can be, with easy-to-obtain parts should your kit have an unfortunate encounter with NST :wink: