Still don't understand why we can't snag spinners

[cavecrusher]

So what if someone comes up with a way to disable a disk?

I think that's called a hardox wedge...

[Ellis]

It's not good evolution if an old sock becomes the weapon of choice. It really is that overpowered. Everyone would just be trying to entangle everyone. Lifters, flippers, axes, exposed wheels, etc, would all also get choked up.

This came up in dramatic style in the Battlebots revamp earlier in the year. See this from about 1min in:



Two highly advanced fighting machines, tens of thousands of dollars involved, fight instantly won by... a net. No fun!

[mrsam]

The rules aren't biased towards spinners as much as you think, yes they're difficult to defend against but it can be done. Take the World Championships this year for example, 6 of the 8 robots i fought in my qualifiers were spinners and i went into every match knowing Hatchet might not come out in one piece again, having said that when i did win a fight down to my robot overcoming the odds it was a fantastic feeling, going into a match knowing you can disable a spinner so easily takes away the competitiveness in my book.

Entanglement IMO is a cheap way to win, not to mention being dangerous for the person who has to try and remove the link of a robot covered in a net.

Also, think of it this way, you're worried about your robot/components being damaged by a spinner, think of the damage that a net could do to the set up of a spinner, it could kill the motor, burn out their speedo or do countless other things that could render it useless and cost the builder a huge amount of money.

[Eventorizon]

You could attempt something similar to do what Shunt did to Hypnodisc in series 4 of Robotwars: Fire an axe or arm with a steel rod into a bar/disc. The disc would grab the bar and pull it round until the bar jammed it against its own body. Then you just retract the arm as all that will have happened is the bar will have stopped the weapon almost instantly, probably bending the bar and probably the spinners chassis as well.
However there are like 10+ reasons why no one tries that, least of all because its a 1 in a million shot and you would need an arm travelling several times faster than the weapon itself to get the bar in.

[daveimi]

Yeah like I have Asperger's so I'm not trying to provoke an argument to say no to spinners and fall out with people and all that type of thing. It's hard to come across as sincere by typing and I'm quite a meek and mild person in the flesh lol and not trying to rant at people. I understand how easy a win would be by clogging a robot up. I just mean that I feel there's ways of wrapping a robot in stuff to clog a disk as a form of defense that are passive and only end up stopping the weapon. I'm not trying to be cheap and stop another robot driving about and all that kind of thing, but I just like the idea of evolution. People build flippers, so others made invert-able robots. People sussed spinners will literally right an opponent off, so those of us with the means to build only pushy robots find a way to defend against it. So the spinner people say incorporate a wedge in the back end to resort to if the blade jams...so on and so forth.

In response to Sam talking about the money involved in clogging a blade up, my pushy robots incorporate about a hundred quids worth of motors, wheels, hubs, Sabertooth, receiver, failsafe and battery. I appreciate that a lipo/spinner set up undoubtedly can get expensive, but even a well specced pusher is not cheap and yet they are regularly badly damaged without any real means of stopping a blade within the weight limit. Any sort of decent material thickness takes you over the various weight limits, hence my questions about finding other ways to stop a spinner blade.

[cavecrusher]

People build flippers, so others made invert-able robots...

finding other ways to stop a spinner blade...

These are two different things, invert-able robot don't stop flippers flipping, they just mitigate the prime effect of the flip itself.
Stopping the disk itself would require a great amount of absorbed energy. Spinners can also be deflected, just look at some of the fights between last rites and sewer snake on ye old interwebz.

[suvv]

dave my beetle bone crusher can survive direct hits from spinners easly it took an asskicking from egg beater and kept going all match best way to defeat a spinner it to design a way to deflect its energy away from your bot instead of trying to absorb it entanglement was banned years ago and it was the best thing to do about it as its as cheep as someone who wins at a computer game through cheat codes

[mrsam]

To be fair mate, and this is in no way a dig, it's difficult to tell from that event how your robot stands up to spinners. Eggbeater was using hair bands (literally, they were hair bands) for belts on it's weapon and it could barely spin up properly. Lynx in the rumble at the end went through 15mm of hdpe on Fhqwhgads and went through the 3mm steel on the front of Flatulence and Spin Cycle was pushing through 10mm hdpe, that's the sort of stuff a robot has to stand up to.

[overkill]

Maybe its time to talk about having a Sportsman class in the UK? Its the perfect solution for everyone who wants to experiment with new designs without having them ripped apart by spinners.

[Niels - Team K.a.L.M.]

Every heavy event is a sportsman class event, no spinners allowed. Not for the feathers and surely not for the heavies.
Only during the FRA FW Champs are spinner weapons allowed, so once a year unless they brave the mainland.