Did some more work on HardWired II today, and it's not good news.

The machine is an absolute travesty, and I can see it getting wrecked by 90% of the machines in the championships. Dare I say, the only machines it'll stand up to are the horizontal spinners, weirdly.

I'll list the problems as they appeared throughout the day:

The chassis has warped. This is really only cosmetic, and doesn't impact the performance of it thankfully, but it isn't half annoying...

Shovel has a 5mm clearance. Partly to do with the twisted chassis, now fixed, though with a 1mm clearance since the scoop itself isn't flush with the floor, I need a grinder to just adjust slightly but I don't have one or indeed anything to amend with) which means that my robot's main strength, the huge drive motors, won't be much use against anything with a lower scoop, such as the legions of flippers and other rambots. Speaking of which:

The drive motors are exposed, which is a very, very, very, very bad thing. I don't have any spares whatsoever, and due to the way it's designed, it's a choice between having thin armour and invertibility, or thicker armour and no invertibility. I did look into both making the wheels larger and different kinds of armour, but to get the necessary clearance to drive upside I'd need something that was no more than 2mm thick which puts my motors in a very dodgy position. Of course, I could look at a self-righting mechanism but, to follow on the chain of events...

I've run out of budget. That's it, I'm stuck with these parts now to resolve the situation. I can't use the Linacs I bought from Mario because they take 24v, and I don't have the weight or money for a 24v battery. The ONLY solution I have to the srimech problem is to use the drills from HardWired I, but that's pushing it in the space I have now, and bearing in mind that I can't afford any more parts until GSL I don't think it'll be doable. Of course, I could always go with no srimech and thick armour on the top, but I have no zero ground clearance on the front scoop and no srimech which is just a loss waiting to happen.

So yeah, if you draw up against HardWired II, you've got yourself a free win! Extremely frustrated with the whole thing now, and I've still got to buy a LiPo sack (to be within the rules) with approximately £0.00 so that should be fun...