This isn't fun anymore

[knightrous]

quote:

Aaron, your arguement is massively oversimplified, annoyingly patronising and verging on being willfully elitist as per usual.

The point with batteries is that unlike armour or motors which have a direct and easily quantifiable effect upon a design, the fact that these fights are written makes a battery stat just a vague and unecessary complication. How long is a written fight? The writer may say its 3 minutes but as you yourself profess vapour fights frequently dont even resemble actual fights anyway and are by no means half as busy as them most of the time, so how can we expect writers to have an accurate guage of time, if anything what we need to devise is a way of standardising how writers percieve time, but of course as there is no way that could ever be done, its just asking for bad writing to enact something which depends on time as a factor, its not like Im saying dont ever include batteries, or even dont allow for batteries in the weight, which Im in fact for.

You always kick off with the personal attacks dont you Alex...

You reckon that batteries dont bring any effect to the battle like armor or motors. The big deal is, motors are dependant on batteries for their performance! You can get away with a LEM130 @ 24v on two packs of nicds, but you will easily degrade the motor down to 50% of its possible performance.

Robot A runs 2 LEM130s with 4packs, sacrifices some armor to get the full power of the motors. Robot B runs 2 LEM130s, with 2 packs and runs heavier armour. The writer just blindly looks at the LEM130 in the stats, goes off a figure that they will both product the same push, but Bot A loses cause it has thinner armor... Makes a big difference. Another can of worms is gearing, gearing can make a big difference in performance.

In the end, we all need to come to a comprimisation, I feel we could work towards something like a chart that shows batteries, voltage, weight and capacities. A similar chart for motors, stating voltage, power input, power output and weight. Simply select your motors from the motor chart, look at the power rating and then select some batteries from the battery charge that match those requirements.

In the end, I believe with some accurate stats across the board, the writer can look at stats and go This bot will be able to out push that bot, since in the stats I can see this one is geared a more for torque instead of speed, This bots weapon has more power then that ones and then throw in an unpredictable element called luck and produce a nice battle, were everyone started off on a level playing field. This also gives the writer an accurate backing behind their battles, weve had disputes with battles before, and rewrites because of it.

As a conceptualist, your too caught up in the glossy picture you drew, instead of thinking about if it will actually work.

[leorcc]

ok, before this goes too far:

We are all rational persons here, lets try to keep a sensible tone in the discussion and not assume the worst in each other. I am sure neither of you meant any disrespect.

[leorcc]

quote:


2. People have to be less harsh with new people. Yes they need to show some effort, but it is pointless to attack them over sub-standard stats, you need to give advice and not dictate to them you must do this, you must do that rember your first set of stats, and how far you have come since then, new people probably are not going to start on a very high level. If I was watching this thinking about signing up and saw some of what some people (a few people in a particular) said and do to the new people, i would not bother to sign up.Hopefully, that is where I would come in. I usually try to stay reasonable, specially to newcomers because I know they are new to the game (and I know I dont have a perfect track record on this but I never resorted to name calling ever, but nothing human is foreign to me). When newcomers present their first stats we a are not going to slash into them, and anyone that tries will deal with me. But respect is a 2 way street, the newcomer needs to be willing to learn the ropes.

[knightrous]

Sall good Leo, just a Zidane of egos

[majinb]

quiet or I headbutt you Aaron!

-2>ok, everyone knows that was a joke, dont hit me please

[paulc]

*Hits Martijn*

[alex_holt]

I wont deny Im a conceptualist and that I deal in should work in theories against your considerably greater direct technical experience but I do try to work on whether things will work or not, and if they dont I fix them, simple as that. However, when you come out with arguements phrased in the same vein as the weight bonus for red robots arguement it just cheeses me off because it just tends to come off as you stating your oppinions as fact in a rather condescending tone. Thats not to say there is no merit to any of your arguements, but rather annoyance at the way you phrase them as absolutes.

Anyway, to the actual discussion at hand:
The point being that with armour or drive its easy to see the direct effect upon a design.
Weapon a will piece armour X but not armour y in a direct hit.
Motor q and motor p are both run at 24 v, p produces mroe power but q is considerably lighter.

The thing with batteries is that the effect is considerably more subtle, takes a lot more knowledge to get right, is as Ive said before is an invitation to writing not backed up by reality in any kind of damage state which will effect the draw, and as damage in vapours is often massively overinflated compared to reality (another issue which I think needs to be addressed perhaps) is just going to be got wrong and negatively effect the realism of fights as a result.

And at the end of the day, this isnt real robots - we cant experiment with things in a real robot and have visible measurable effects of things to compare to one another to see what works best, so for all intents and purposes unless you are going to be meticulous about it (as you are, being the only major vaporbotteer to have sufficient experience to do so) a robot design is a hypothesis.

My main concern is that I think we are currently about perfectly balanced between the scissors/paper/stone state of affairs and all of vapours being just a series of tedious technical chores, and personally I suspect that detailled battery stats are the first step in tipping it over into the tedious technical chore side.

Vapourbots is about a bit of fun, not about becoming engineering experts.

[leorcc]

Alex, Thats a fair enough assessment I think.

How about when all the hard stuff is done on a website like this one:

http://architeuthis-dux.org/torquecalc.asphttp://architeuthis-dux.org/torquecalc.asp

Would that be of more help?

(Message edited by leorcc on August 15, 200

[knightrous]

Ah, I totally forgot about the Tentacle calculator! Good post there Leo.

Alex, it doesnt have to be a chore, it might be the first time, but once some simple knowledge is formed, it becomes easy. You could get to a point that, when you put two LEM130s into a design @ 36v, you know to put 3 x 36v packs in with it to get the full potential of the motors. If we can form some cheat sheets (Like a bus time table, pick the day and the time, and you get the number of the bus you have to catch), so you can just select a motor and a voltage and it will tell you what you need, you can easily knock up accurate info about a design.