Fight 3 Vs. Antithesis:

Fight starts at 1:14:30.


Me and Antithesis pre-fight.

My next match was up against arguably the standout performer of the tournament, Antithesis. This crusher had gone through numerous iterations leading up to this tournament, but the builder Jed really seemed to find the sweet spot this time round between drive power, an effective front end, and a nasty crusher capable of piercing top armour, as it had done in both of its prior fights.


Antithesis with a forceful grab on me (compare this to some of the images above to see where the main lifter bolt should be).

Within seconds of the fight starting, Antithesis managed to hook onto the bolt of the lifter mechanism, and crushed the entire bulkhead right down deep into the robot (it turns out hollowing out your bulkheads can be a negative in this one particular instance). Antithesis had to let go after the 20 seconds were up, and somehow the lifter mechanism seemed to spring back into place. Afterwards we continued to have our tête-à-tête’s, but while we both had similar drive power, my TPU fork setup seemed to come out the loser against the steel forks of my opponent, and eventually Antithesis managed to hook onto the front end of my wedgelet setup, and skilfully manoeuvred me into the pit, knocking me out at the round of 16 stage of a competition once more. Fortunately I had no lasting damage from the excruciating attack from Antithesis, but if I had a nickel for everytime I lost to a crusher in the BW scene via pitting and surviving with minimal damage, despite a grab that got into the innards of the bot, then I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.


The more gentle bite that would ultimately take me out of the competition.

Fight 4 Vs. Bob Toss, Fatal Deviation, Siren:

Fight starts at 1:43:06.

Normally once I get eliminated from a tournament around the top 32/16 stage (read: everytime), I like to throw Babróg into a spinner melee to test the robots durability, but since I already had a good idea of how durable this iteration of the robot was, and I was going to be going to another tournament in a short time anyway (Battle in the Burgh 4), I decided instead to enter a non-spinner whiteboard. However, I did find another way to spice up this match. Throughout the day I had been providing commentary for many of the fights throughout the tournament, and there was a group decision that I would provide live commentary for the fight that I was currently competing in.


The chaos of the start of the fight.

The other competitors in this whiteboard were all lifters, including the bricky Fatal Deviation, the angular Siren, and the artistic Bob Toss along with its minibot Beat the Devil. This match was pretty hectic even without trying to provide my own commentary, with each machine managing some decent shoves of their own. I failed a few times to get an effective suplex on my opponents, though I was generally able to shove opponents around. The fight started to favour me once the pit button was pressed, and a fortunate shove on Bob Toss eliminated one of my opponents. Shortly after, I managed to flip both Siren and Fatal Deviation with a single flip, something which I reckon would have been impossible with the old setup. Siren was shoved into the pit shortly after, and in what may have been my favourite move in the tournament so far, I managed to suplex Fatal Deviation straight into the pit itself. I finally attempted to suplex Beat the Devil out of the arena, but failing that and running low on time, I elected instead to shove my final opponent into the pit.

Conclusion:

This was another really fun event for me, and provided me with further info at what this new Babróg is good and bad at. The positives to take away were ones I had previously established at Robot Rebellion, but could be confirmed once again. The new lifter has been a direct upgrade from the original machine, with stalling and slipping as issues being removed entirely. The additional length of the lifter forks has been a small upgrade, but it does seem to have made scoring a grab as opposed to a lift slightly more consistent. The new TPU parts have also performed very well, with the new front end capable of actually matching some modern day forked front ends, and the TPU wedge looks to straddle a decent balance between taking hits while remaining viable against fork-heavy designs.

Some design limitations do remain however; the horizontal config continues to struggle at hooking onto and lifting opponents, my drive platform continues to lose effectiveness fast once an opponent gets under me (though the cutouts at the rear do grant me a small amount of additional control), and I can still get out-wedged by control bots in head on scenarios. Many of these issues are hard to solve due to my design goals, since Babróg has always been designed to counter spinning weapons over control-based designs, and this tankiness comes at the cost of recessed internals that limit the angles at which I can effectively drive. This competition ultimately didn’t give me too many opportunities to face spinners, though the fact I performed as well as I did against so many control bots does give me some confidence regarding this platform going forward.

And that was the BBB Beetle Champs 2024. Once again, my thanks to all the folks who do all of the behind the scenes work, and to all of the competitors who put on a hell of a show. Special congrats to Antithesis for the remarkable run the robot had this time round, Impulse for its great performances as a control bot against some nasty spinners, and Frenzy for its entertaining run to the championship! I look forward to updating you all on how I performed in Burgh, probably my most anticipated competition of the entire year!


The crushed bulkhead the day after the tournament. No visible signs of damage at all, it's mad how the elastic properties of HDPE play out sometime.