VGC Design Challenge 002: Vapours. On Ice!

[alex_holt]

So, I'm posting this up early to give people a bit of a headstart to get designing. As the name suggests, this one is all about vapourbots on a slightly different arena to usual.

The Ice Arena is essentially what it says on the tin, unfortunatly I can't find the information for the exact thickness of it, but it's basically as follows (if someone has any specific data that would be welcome):

A 10m deep tank of water, on the top of which is a crust of ice thick enough to support a vapourbot with a sensiblely large contact to spread it's weight, but not enough to support something with fairly limited contact.. For instance, tornado or storm 2 would be able to move around, stinger on the other hand might have more problems.

Considerations:

- Traction will be way less than usual
- Most attacks, even ramming will run the risk of breaking and sending their foe to a watery grave.
- You are completely allowed to have a submersibal robot if you wish - falling in the water isn't an automatic knockout unless it kills your robot.
- Do you want to stay on the ice or break it? The ability to go underwater is undoubtedly valuable, but most attacks will be more effective on a solid surface.

Same rules as before, only entries are one which get in on time, this time the closing date is Midnight GMT on the 3rd of August.

EDIT: Due to Martijn asking, the clusterbot rule here is no clusterbots. They take a bit away from the challenge in this particular round.

[Max]

Here's my entry:

Pingu

Shape -


As you can see it has two large tanks (1500mm long 500mm diameter) made from closed cell foam with 1mm titanium coat (just to hold it together not for protection- designed to have chunks taken out by axes) even with punctures still won't sink. These tanks have Archimedes screws on them to break up the ice and propel it through the water like this machine:


Colour - the tanks are painted black, the central section is white and the flipper arm is orange (looks like a penguin!) if I have time I'll upload a picture to show the colours!

Weight - 100kg

Motors – Uses bosch 750 motors with mod 2 gear reduction (10-1) then a 3:1 reduction via 50mm wide timing belts directly to the drums. This should give a reasonable speed as it doesn't need much power

Batteries: 3x 6s lipo battery 10Ah in series

Wheels - none, just uses the Archimedes screws for propulsion and flotation

Speed - 12mph

Clearance - the middle section of the robot is slightly submerged by 15mm so the bottom is all sealed

Armour - the central section is made of 3mm titanium with an aluminium angle frame supporting all the components near the middle of this box so even if some water gets in hopefully it will avoid shorting and most axe weapons won't get close enough because of the large lightweight tanks. The front wedge and flipper arm is made from 4mm hardox

Dimensions - huge! 1.5m long, the tanks are 500mm diameter and the central box is 400mm wide, 250mm high

Weapons - It has a pneumatic four bar flipper on the front, small full pressure ram 30mm bore 100mm stroke. This is designed to turn over other robots hopefully to sink them or make there drive/weapons useless. The whole pneumatics system is in a different section of the robot which can be flooded with water as obviously pneumatics is water tight, it is separated from the electronics via a waterproof and sealed wall with only the wires for the vice coming through.
I will also use the drive to break up the ice around non-submersible robots or obits which work better on the ice.

Scrimech: it can run inverted, the whole middle box is sealed with silicon so it can be fully submerged and turned upside down, the drive works upside down but no the weapon .

The whole thing has to be very light weight to due to the large tanks on both sides even though they don't weigh much. The "screw" part of the archimedes screw is made from 6mm titanium.

Hope that's all ok.

[alex_holt]

Just to let everyone know, the deadline for this challenge is now extended until midnight on Wednesday.

[JamesDavies]

I've never done this before so I have no idea what I'm doing but here is "Flame Based Pain". With big wheels and a flamethrower to melt the ice out from under the opponent Flame Based Pain.jpg

[alex_holt]

Welcome James, that's a good start with that render but I need some stats to go with it unfortunatly, if you look at Max's stats above you get a general idea. Feel free to miss out the battery section and just pinch the motors and other technical bit from someone else's robot stats to get you going. Also usually speaking flamethrowers are illegal in Vapourbots, but due to this particular theme, I'll make an exception.

More generally: Given we currently don't have enough entries, but I have heard various people expressing an interest, I'll add another 2 weeks to the clock to give people a bit more time to get creative. Lets say Saturday the 24th as that then puts me in the clear of stuff I need to do before then.

[alex_holt]

Right, as no one managed to meet the second deadline either, there probably isn't much point in opening this for longer - I am willing to run some small things but I'll consider what to do...

[playzooki]

i could just chuck in bombard from zed if you really want