Monsoon v Red Devil (Episode 4)
As everyone knows by now, we won our first fight, against Red Devil!
It was an incredible fight, and really shows both how tough Red Devil is and how destructive Monsoon can be!
What happened to our weapon though? When we were flipped, our weapon was spinning the wrong way. So when we hit Red Devil the wrong way, their plough was drawn into our weapon bulkheads, where it damaged the bottom part of the frame and jammed the weapon. The smoke you saw was from the belts slipping, as we couldn’t spin whilst the weapon was jammed. If you look closely you can see that Tim was trying to spin up the weapon and it moved slightly then jammed again.
It was great to see Monsoon’s pivot in action, and to be able to show how Monsoon can just carry on running without a break as soon as it's flipped over. Ideally we would have reversed the weapon, but in practice we quickly learned that during a fight it was more effective to hit the opponent and try to get flipped back over, or simply hit them with the weapon spinning the wrong way and try to inflict damage. Slowing down the weapon enough to reverse it simply takes too long in a fight where every second is vital.
Discovery turned our repairs after this fight into episode 1 of Battlebots: Resurrection, have a look at Monsoon Gets Stormed | BattleBots: Resurrection!
How can we stop this kind of self-inflicted damage from happening again? Well you’ll just have to see our next fight... see you then!
1 - 0 to Monsoon!
Monsoon v Petunia (Episode 6)
Oh no not again... Our second fight, against Team PCP and Petunia from Holland was another great fight with plenty of destruction and this time we caused a fire as well!
How come the weapon stopped? On the second hit that sent Petunia flying, we actually bent our weapon shaft, and warped the shape of the weapon bar slightly. This was all just enough to stop the weapon from spinning.
Luckily we had a couple of days between this fight and the next one. So the first thing we did was go out and get enough new titanium to make several new weapon shafts - thanks to the awesome guys at Tormach Inc., they made us a new one, plus a spare (just in case!) Even though we did lose the weapon in this fight too, we’re learning from each fight about what works, and what doesn’t work.
Monsoon hits hard, very hard - however we need to be able to sustain these hits.
Towards the end of the fight you might have spotted that we stopped moving. We actually lost traction due to the amount of hydraulic fluid now in the arena. Our drive motors are fine, but we did have to de-oil the entire robot after that fight, and the floor of the Battlebox took a long time to clean up as well!
See you soon in our next fight!