I first blogged about MicroWave back last summer. It's one of my favorite builds I've ever done, and I've put a lot of time and effort into it.
Well, here's where we are now:
Lots of changes! Among the upgrades made since I first blogged about the bot all those months ago are:
A completely rebuilt weapon housing. If you look at a photo of MicroWave version two, you'll see that the mount for the weapon is encased by 2x4 bricks. The current design is just solid plates.
A detachable handle, dubbed the Can't Handle It, allowing me to run longer weapon blades.
Speaking of weapon blades, only one of my original batch has survived—the Disc (top left). I also have the heavy-tipped Graveyard (bottom right), the massive asymmetrical Key Toe Diet (bottom left), and the Thick Bar 2.0 (not shown).
The frame and armor have been beefed up.
The contact points on the bottom are set up differently.
I recently added some ablative armor on the front. Hopefully, that's one or two hits the opponent lands that don't do anything to the main body.
Oh, and—the bot on the right is new (kind of a test platform for MicroWave). I call it RadioWave. It sports:
Greatly improved frame strength (due to unconventional construction)
Front ablative armor
Lower chassis overall (exposing the technic beams that hold it together)
All the same weapon capabilities as MicroWave—except that more recently I altered the gearbox to fit in the shortened frame, so it doesn't spin quite as fast.
A handle similar to MicroWave's.
RadioWave is newer and less of a priority for me, so it hasn't had the same success earned by weeks and weeks of experience. However, it's more durable and now quite reliable.
The two have fought each other once, and RadioWave came out the victor when MicroWave's massive "F it we ball" Turtle disk broke.
How's it going?
MicroWave currently has a winning streak (three wins) vs vertical spinners, and a losing streak (five losses) against full-body "top" spinners.
In my most recent fight, against the five-time champion full-body spinner Chopper, the first hit completely collapsed my frame internally. In a total violation of the laws of physics, Chopper hit me so hard my wheel system broke, and on the inside too (the weapon technically still worked, so that's something).
I've had good fights recently too. I took a chunk out of the blade of the mighty vertical spinner Undertaker, ripped veteran vert and three-time champion Skeleton in half in our last encounter, and utterly destroyed my rookie eggbeater spinner Bobcat (which somehow survived to a judges' decision).
The reigning champion is Free Ripping, a top spinner built to weigh exactly 460 grams—right at the limit. When spun, it stores fully nine times as much energy as MicroWave's heaviest blade. It hits stupidly hard, and just as importantly can survive the massive forces from when it hits someone. The current ruleset (can be read in full here) and arena setup (literally just "fight in a big room with a wood floor") are pretty beneficial to tops, and so we've seen a lot of dominance from the best ones in recent tournaments. However, Free Ripping shocked everyone by dominating its rookie season and winning the title as a rookie, something that hasn't been achieved since Tearnado III did it a long time ago.
Fighting wedges and blade height
Both MicroWave and RadioWave, being horizontal spinners, struggle against wedges. A big smooth wedge serves to deflect a horizontal's blows and redirect the force up into its blade, which can damage it or unbalance the rest of the bot (for an example of good wedges facing powerful horizontals in real robot combat, see here and here).
Bringing the blade lower reduces this problem, but doesn't remove it. In addition, I can only bring the blade so far down because as overcutters MicroWave and RadioWave have the blade on top of the chassis. I can get the blade down a decent amount, but there's a limit. MicroWave uses the same general mounting setup as GyroWave did all those years ago (though heavily reinforced and way more durable), but RadioWave actually uses a different setup which allows me to have the weapon a plate's thickness lower, as long as I don't cover the technic rods running from top to bottom.
Tilting the bot forward when attacking brings the blade a lot lower, but leads to issues of its own, mostly related to gyroscopic force or recoil from the spinner.
Other projects
Right now I'm fielding three main bots: MicroWave, RadioWave, and Undertaker. Undertaker is a huge vertical spinner that hits fully twice as hard as the twins. It's basically a glass canon centered around the massive weapon.
For the next tournament, I'm also entering Ender, a smaller vertical spinner with a super awesome RadioWave-type frame design (my Free Ripping killer), and Spinster, a generic top spinner. I like spinners ;)
Also in the works is an eggbeater called Lynx, based on Calvin Iba's absolute monster of a beetleweight. I haven't started building it yet, and may not for a while due to parts scarcity, but I'm pretty excited to construct it. I hope to bring together all the lessons I've learned from RadioWave, Ender, and various previous eggbeaters into an incredibly solid bot with a powerful weapon. I also want to equip it with ground-scraping wedgelets which I can swap out for a single-piece wedge.