INSOMNIA 63

Shrapnel did a good at Insomnia this year! She went 5-1 in the competition, finishing top 8 again and dishing out some of the biggest hits of the event.



You may notice that this year she had a brand new wedgelet:



In response to the ever ongoing wedge war this is held down onto the floor by around 4.5kg of magnetic downforce. When I tested it in the arena it scraped the paint off of the brand new floor! Unfortunately it does increase the insert time for the disc, making it more difficult to hit consistently with it attached. Because of this I would only use it if I didn't think any other strategy would work, and since I never had a fight against something I didn't think I could either outwedge with the regular wide wedge or outmanoeuvre, I never had a chance to use it in combat

My draw for the first round was certainly kinder than last year;
Fight 1:
Crabsolutely Clawful & Aegis Mk II
Fight 2:
Strix & Calabash Brothers
Fight 3:
Nigel Barrage & Orpheus

Hardly last year's baptism of fire at the hands of Shard and Neon, but not a cakewalk either.

Fight 1



Upping the drive to 6S made the steering faster, but also made it gyro more than I was used to or comfortable with. This made lining up hits at the start tough, and I lowered the rates on the steering channel after the fight to 85% to be more in line with last year. Once I got a handle on it though I did some pretty nasty damage. The disc stops here because I clearly hadn't done enough to the link to stop it pulling out on a big impact like say, accidentally faceplanting the brand new Hardox floor?





Luckily she drives beautifully and I could still take control of the fight with no weapon and win by KO

Fight 2



This one was the one that worries me the most, Calabash was a very nice looking vertical spinner that I thought could do some nasty damage if I let him. I put on the old wedge for this fight in anticipation of taking some damage, but as it happens I only took a small glancing blow. The last hit I landed on Calabash cleaved clean through the back of his CNCd HDPE chassis, which I believe was 15mm thick:



I got one good hit on the side of Strix before my weapon died again, this time for a completely different small and annoying reason! This time the top two mounting screws had worked themselves loose and because of the resulting tilt the belt no longer engaged with the teeth on the motor pulley. Irritatingly the old wedge wasn't quite flat enough to outwedge Strix, and that coupled with a weird sudden drive glitch causing stutter and unintended movements (remember this, it's important later) meant that Strix thoroughly ran circles around me for the rest of the fight until time was called. I won on a judge's decision based on damage, I did think Strix edged it against me on aggression but the judges decision is final. The weird drive glitch went away once I plugged the link back in to test, so I chalked it up to just robots being robots and carried on.

Fight 3



Ye so this one was uh

An experience



Nigel Barrage had unfortunately snapped his weapon motor shaft in his last fight, and chose to pull a hard Brexit from the competition rather than face me weaponless. With that one hit, almost every threaded insert holding Orpheus' chassis together was torn clean out of the HDPE, and it seperated into about 5 distinct pieces. I also left a large bite mark in the wedge:



Threaded inserts: not even once

So at the end of the qualifiers I had 11 points out of a total 12, solidifying my place in the top 20.

Fight 4

My fight in the round of 20 was Hell's Angel, a magmotor powered axe that had already caused a Lipo fire at the event.



As my top armour is thin carbon fiber, taking a hit from Hells Angel was very undesirable. So to make sure I didn't end up on his wedge I turned the weapon down to half speed at first to mess his wedge up before going in for the kill. The strategy worked and I ripped off his wedge. One of the hits also indirectly cracked one of his wheels from the sheer shock.

Fight 5

My round of 12 fight was against Aegis, a bot I'd faced last year in my tie breaker melee but never actually engaged.



Once again this fight worried me since Rory's a really good driver who took out some nasty spinners earlier by outdriving them. I ran half speed in this fight as well, not wanting to get caught mid gyro turn. In this fight I had some control issues; the left hand belt had been looser than the right hand belt since the start of the competition but in this fight it began to slip across the pulley teeth hard when going in one direction, which made turning much slower than normal. Thankfully the wedge did its job and stopped Aegis getting any purchase on me, and I was able to line up an OOTA shot on him to win the fight.

The following day I bodged a bolt under the left side belt to retension it, which sorted the drive issue.

Fight 6

In the quarter finals I was drawn against Calabash Brothers again.



Confident I would be able to outdrive him again, I opted for the old wedge over the new one and planned to attack his wheels and backside. Unfortunately, this was where it ended for Shrapnel. That drive issue I had earlier against them and Strix had been caused by a tiny short on the ESC board across the calibrate jumper. When the ESC goes into calibrate mode, it takes the input from the sticks as min and max values, which affected my drive against Strix. However in this fight, by the end, calibrate mode had become stuck on and I lost complete control of the bot. Worse than simply losing to an electrical glitch, right before the ESC stops responding I clipped Calabash's wheel, cracking it and snapping his drive belt off:



If the drive had lasted another 30 seconds without dying, I would have been able to line up another shot on his other side and taken his drive out completely! Frustrated to lose in that way but hey ho, these things happen!

All in all Shrapnel performed amazingly this year and I'm so pleased with it! It needs very little refinement now, I have plans to use the extra weight to further reduce the bots gyro and need to buy a new Scorpion XL but aside from that, the new shaft retention system worked a treat and the Hardox 600 disc has stood up far better than the 500 disc did last year:



(The white is actually an HDPE film from Aegis Mk II lol)

I'm planning to do some Extreme Robots events later in the year and have another feather planned to be more live show friendly, and Shrapnel will hopefully attend the RoboDojo featherweight open in November. That's all for now, thanks for reading my rambles!