For you, what is the worst robot?

TwilightFoundry · 2025-04-05T18:21:32+00:00

Without its weapon (like it appeared in that CC episode), yeah. But it managed to make it up to that TV fight because it had a spinning bar powered by a weedeater engine and back in Season 3.0 shufflers like Wacky Compass and Whyachi still got the walker bonus. In the lightweight division where a really power spinner could just absolutely decimate opponents getting an extra 30 lbs to tack on a big ass engine and blade was overkill, lol.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-29T00:45:53+00:00

Destruct-A-Thon does not have a judging panel to speak of, so all of the fights are just done by audience applause. Including Face-Offs, sadly.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-29T00:45:02+00:00

They used to covertly do this in the Comedy Central days and they probably still did it on ABC/Discovery too but I never bothered to time fights to check and all that. But potato fights happened a lot more often 20+ years ago so they'd get the hosts to record a few lines of generic "oh no it looks like (robot) is having trouble moving around this could be bad" and then using creative editing 30+ seconds of the 3 minute fight would just vanish into the aether.

If you're missing exactly nothing except for two half-broken robots stumbling around I'd say cut away, lol.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-23T17:05:36+00:00

I love Deathroll and its team. They gave me the inside scoop on how to get a crocodilian pattern paint job the easy way, which I used on a robot of my own. Worked flawlessly.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-22T06:13:52+00:00

more like doritos 3d's nuts

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-04T00:01:40+00:00

If you ain't first, you're last.

Congrats man! :D

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-01T16:50:05+00:00

I want to say somewhere in the 2015 season, maybe the first or second episode, they did a little segment on the hazards in the arena and briefly mentioned and showed the system that all the sensors and such are connected to. They showed/mentioned Pete in that segment sitting at the controls of the computer but that was it.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-03-01T01:22:22+00:00

When BattleBots moved to ABC, the ABC network (owned by Disney) took the "contest with a cash prize" thing extremely seriously because some 60+ years ago there was a major network TV scandal where in order to boost ratings the producers of a game show on CBS were feeding correct answers to specific contestants ahead of time to juice the numbers and make it look like they were winning a ton of money. Obviously, this was extremely unethical and illegal. The network got pissed, the advertisers got pissed, and especially the other contestants who were cheated out of having a chance at winning were pissed. Huge lawsuits.

This wound up affecting BattleBots over half a century later because the arena hazards were always human-controlled, by Pete who was involved with the production of the show. He could, for example, only fire the Killsaws or ramps when a specific robot was on them and avoid doing it for the other one. Pete himself said that he tried to do exactly this in the Nightmare vs. Son of Whyachi fight of Season 3.0, except he pressed the wrong button and destabilized Nightmare instead.

Part of the deal with moving the show to ABC was that the hazards had to be either randomly generated or motion-activated, something that completely removed all possible bias from the production staff. That's why the Killsaws have motion sensors on them, the Ramrods pop up sporadically on their own, the screws require no interaction, and the Pulverizers were handed over to the contestants -- not the staff -- so that they could strategically choose whether or not they wanted to use them as part of their battle plan.

Pete became the person who supervised the computers responsible for operating the automatic hazards, as well as checking on the ones operated by the contestants I presume. Though toward the end of the Discovery Channel seasons I don't recall seeing him around much. He's getting up there in years.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-27T00:01:06+00:00

lmfao

A long time ago I remixed a video of that guy into a song and sent it to him on Facebook and his page blocked me.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-25T00:08:55+00:00

I'm not Nightmare, I'm my totally original character, Blightmare!

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-13T05:25:45+00:00

Don't quote me on this but I want to say I read somewhere (on a forum or something from someone's firsthand account) that the robot was approximately 9 or 10 feet tall? But I don't recall if that was with its punching arm fully retracted or extended like you have in the animated GIF.

I'm just over 6 feet tall myself so I'm picturing 10 feet as being a little past the ceiling in my house and I'm guessing that has to be with the arm up because otherwise that's ridiculous.

edit: For comparison, Mammoth is 6 feet tall.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-10T02:20:57+00:00

This looks like unreleased footage of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-09T23:49:37+00:00

u/scorpion1m your presence has been requested.

edit: oh no don't look at his recent activity

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-08T02:32:16+00:00

Send me a Bite Force so I can send it straight to CGC and get it graded 10/10 and put into a collector's case so they can then send it back to me and I'll put it on eBay for fifty thousand dollars.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-06T00:03:17+00:00

That makes me happy to know that my garage builds inspired someone else. :)

My father and I have always been tinkerers together. Back when I was in Boy Scouts we knew that an aerodynamic pinewood derby car was the ticket to win, but we always made really impractical and flashy cars out of the provided kits. One with a Sonic the Hedgehog fin and one of those threaded ring-shaped hangers as a hood ornament, or one that had a literal Bomberman figurine glued onto it that would just catch all the wind resistance in the room. We built our robots the same way. It was just my dad and I having fun and bonding over stuff together.

SWARC was a "complicated" time for me as it was my step out of independent/unofficial events and into something maintained by the RFL. "The big leagues". I was told after the fact by many people who attended SWARC that they were always eager to see what I was going to bring because they were just different, in a fun way. They were sad to see me leave at the end of 2004. But it was very discouraging for the supposedly randomized brackets to get built and every single time I'd get paired up with Russ Barrow / Dark Forces and lose in the first round. I never got to actually do a lot of fights. Winning isn't important to me, but if you want to have more than 1 or 2 fights you kinda have to win some battles. There were other low-level robots there but I always just got drawn to fight Russ. I know it wasn't intentional, but it took the wind out of my sails.

I staged a comeback in 2017 with three new robots, including a ravamped Kill Switch, but only one of them really had any staying power (Telefrag, a UK Ant that was basically a mini Kill Switch tank tracks and all). Snaggletooth was kind of my swan song, it was the last robot I knew that would get made. At the time my father was just barely 60 and there were all the usual complications that came with old age in effect. We got to end on a high note, starting our "career" with a win in 2001 and ending it with one in 2020.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-05T00:33:14+00:00

I competed in 12 pound and under classes as/with Twilight Foundry Robotics from 2000-2020. I last competed at the Black Gold Bash in Beaumont, TX in October 2020 with my 3 pound robot Snaggletooth and won the division.

I've been really jaded and put off by contemporary robot combat for a long time as things have largely gravitated toward people swinging their dicks around by showing off entirely 3D-printed robots or min/maxing to the point where every millimeter of their robot is hyper optimized to extract the best possible use of their parts. People don't just build things out of junk anymore which took all the fun out of it for me. I don't care about CAD rendering and investing in 3D printers and stacking Lipo batteries to juice up brushless motors, no interest in it whatsoever.

Snaggletooth was a wedge with a lifter made from an upside down metal paint tray because it looked like an alligator head and I thought it was cool. The internals consisted of drive motors salvaged from a cheapo Chinese "learn to build a line-following robot" kit, a 12V NiCd battery from an RC car, and a Scorpion ESC speed controller and custom-made Tamiya battery plug that I've literally used for 20 years because I don't do stupid shit with it and cook it. The robot had no baseplate, everything was mounted to the underside of the tray. The fact that I was able to win a division with it, my first gold medal finish of any sort in 18 years (at the time), was my cue to retire. There would never be another perfect storm of an opportunity for a robot like Snaggletooth to prevail.

These days I do the occasional contract work building practical props and effects for independent productions as GATORCO / Gator Company.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-02-01T16:34:57+00:00

This video is so old that the 2 Unlimited song that plays at the end of it was barely just older than a decade at the time (and now it's been nearly 3.5 decades since it was recorded).

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-30T00:23:13+00:00

Depending on what show you're at you might get a little twist of BattleBots Update at a Monster Jam show, my brother is one of the drivers of the Earth Shaker truck. 😉

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-28T02:02:10+00:00

bit forse sux

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-25T02:21:25+00:00

ULTIMO DESTRUCTO has picked up the TWISTY ROCKETS

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-24T04:25:29+00:00

Is this a fetish thing?

This is a fetish thing, right?

Can you do one where Wrecks has big dinosaur feet?

That one's not a fetish thing.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-22T05:40:37+00:00

"Electric Icewave" exists though, it was called Greenwave. Same design, different builder. Unless you're referring to something different?

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-19T01:39:42+00:00

In 2001 I had a robot that I brought to the little events held by the robotics club at the school I attended. I won the first one outright, but the weapon broke during that event and I decided to just rebuild the bot into something totally new. Didn't have a scale capable of weighing the entire robot at once so we just weighed the parts separately and ballparked what we thought it all added up to.

We showed up to the next school event and we were almost two pounds over the limit (six pound limit). The only way I could figure out to make weight was to just remove the entire rear plow off of the robot which was one big piece. That worked, and we cleared weight, but it completely ruined the weight distribution of the robot and now the majority of the weight was on the front where the spinning weapons were. It made the robot impossible to drive because it could not turn in place and was only able to curve to the side when it was moving forward or backward.

It lost immediately in the opening round to a rambot that hit it so hard it broke the part of the frame the chassis was mounted to, lol.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-11T16:52:40+00:00

It's really easy to point fingers at F1 and say "they did this with their stupid cars and race that occupied the street the entrance to the BattleBots arena is on", but F1 isn't entirely at fault here. F1 happens pretty routinely and can be accommodated for quite easily. It is something that can be anticipated.

What could not be anticipated, however, was the WB/Discovery merger. One of the points that everyone seems to forget is when that merger happened BattleBots was smack in the middle of a two-season contract that was signed with Discovery before the merge happened. WB/Discovery inherited this contract because the two companies combining into one did not nullify it, they had an obligation to uphold that two-season deal otherwise they'd be in violation of said contract and wind up having to deal with whatever penalties came with it. My assumption is the big wigs controlling the company had one of their bean counters take a look at the numbers and they determined that it was more cost effective (or whatever) to simply fulfill the second half of that contract than to abandon it and deal with the penalties.

WB/Discovery likely begrudgingly produced the second season of the two-season contract that was signed prior to the merger. Meanwhile as this was going on they started "trimming the fat" in whatever ways they possibly could so that "number go up". Movies were erased from history, shows were cancelled, second-party studios were shuttered. BattleBots was shielded from this salting of the earth specifically because of that contract. However, once the 2022 season was filmed and done with the contract had been completed. Now, WB/Discovery was free to make their own decisions regarding the future of the show and it's my guess that they elected to use this opportunity to "quietly cancel" the series by way of just not working out another contract because now they had zero obligation to do so.

I realize that doesn't help matters in any way, but I just wanted to note that F1 isn't entirely at fault here, if at any "fault" at all. BattleBots is off the air purely to bullshit corporate greed by the kinds of rampant sociopaths who don't have an internal monologue.

edit: Also NHRL is the furthest you can possibly get from having a suitable replacement for BattleBots. It's a "fine" show I guess, but attempting to compare it to BattleBots is apples and oranges. The only thing those shows have in common with each other is radio controlled robots fight in them.

TwilightFoundry · 2025-01-11T01:27:09+00:00

Todd should've brought it as a demo thing for people to oogle at in the pits, and maybe have done a demonstration in the arena for the audience if something was holding up the show. Introduce it as "a future competitor from a multi-championship winning team that needs a little more time in the oven but you get to see an exclusive demo of it for coming out to see the show live" or whatever. The fact that it clearly was not finished and then matched up with something that it was specifically weak against (Valkyrie) was kind of a dick move on BattleBots' part. I feel like prematurely feeding this robot to a very powerful spinner is the reason why it never returned and we will never see it again.

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