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| Nightmare competed at the August 14-15 1999 BattleBots! |
Nightmare has made it through the 1999 BattleBots event in Long Beach! Here's a little about how it went:
Nightmare weighed in at 202.5 lbs with weapon A (The heavier disk) configuration, so I was prepared to pull off some minor parts to get him down to 200, but it turned out to be unneccesary, as the limit was increased to 210 at the last minute.
Nightmare displayed well for the safety judges, they had no concerns with his safety swich, failsafes, battery connections, wiring, etc. They did, however, show a large concern with the speed of the spinning weapon, and the fact that it takes a considerable time to spin down. Regardless, he made it through and went on to fight.
Unfortunately, after his first match against FrenZy (see below), the safety crew soon determined that Nightmare was just too dangerous for the arena to contain him and the shrapnel of other robots that he would easily generate, so they gave me the following choices:
- Voluntarily drop out of the competition and accept a special award, or
- Reduce the speed of the spinning disc weapon, or
- Reverse the speed of the spinning disc.Too Dangerous!?!
Well, of course I wasn't about to take the lazy way out and take the special award, I built this thing to fight, so darn well I better get to! I toyed with the idea of pulsing the motor on and off to reduce the speed, but it was not going to be easy to convince the judges that would work, so in the short time available, I agreed to reverse the direction of the weapon.
Why is this important? Well, with the disc spinning outward and upward, any opponent I hit is forced upward and away, but if I reverse it, The opponent is simply shoved into the ground, and my robot is forced upwards on the leverage of the other robot. Yuck! This was very evident in a later match versus Punjar, where Nightmare threw himself a good 6 feet in the air after hitting Punjar. (it looked great though) As you can imagine, I did not want to reverse the direction, but it was the only way I could compete. (This time)
Anyway, Nightmare went on to fight four total matches, only one in the correct spinning orientation, the first one:
The Opponents:
vs. FrenZy - won
vs. Killerhurtz - lost
vs. Malicious Mischief - won
vs. Punjar -lost
Nightmare was suffering from some electrical problems and I was unable to repair him in time for the Robot Rumble.
