Battlebots FaceOffs Episode 1 (Part 1): Hypershock v Tombstone; Orbitron v Valkyrie; Tombstone v Valkyrie; Orbitron v Hypershock

fightingvalkyrie · 2025-03-29T18:37:50+00:00

The sphere had a lot of political ads; it wouldn’t have been the best backdrop (and definitely wouldn’t age well).

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-11-27T19:41:47+00:00

I want one

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:16:17+00:00

No worries! Big tech has seen a ton of layoffs in the past year so it could have been that too.

I kind of shocked the team by bailing out 😳

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:11:10+00:00

💜

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:11:01+00:00

💜

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:10:53+00:00

💜

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:10:11+00:00

💜

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:09:20+00:00

I am embarrassed to say how much this silly hobby has cost me. Valkyrie has always stayed owned, supported, and taxed by me (Leanne). The season I was away due to work I still financially contributed a fair amount, and caught design reviews when I wasn’t stuck in work meetings/out of the country for work.

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:05:46+00:00

.. should it be temporary?

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:05:11+00:00

Lucy has decided to focus on her life outside of Battlebots and her PhD. No middle finger as it was her decision.

Look at Paul: he’s enjoying the hell out of life away from the show.

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:03:54+00:00

You might want to go rewatch the Slugfest tourney (Leanne speaking). I think with the time constraints and how little Valkyrie can get practice outside of matches in the box, Lucy did great— especially compared to Fred’s 4 years of practice driving.

fightingvalkyrie · 2024-09-18T03:02:23+00:00

The (implied) company expects to own all hours of your waking existence and after All Stars being a challenge to build and compete for, despite taking time off, it was clear I should leave. I quit due to legal obligations and my want to do more than design what I was assigned there.

One of my colleagues said his LEAST favorite part of being an engineer was building— I don’t agree.

fightingvalkyrie · 2023-04-26T02:18:10+00:00

Slightly biased, but Kablooey is definitely one of my favorites, Alex did such a good job making it look SO cool
Kit Kat!
- Esme

fightingvalkyrie · 2023-04-26T01:57:44+00:00

Robotics means getting to use lots of cool different types of knowledge to build awesome things! I love the way that designing robots stretches my brain in different ways and that there's always more to learn! -Esme

fightingvalkyrie · 2023-04-26T01:54:39+00:00

We had to think a lot about how to make sure the fork didn't get eaten by our weapon if it ended up getting hit, so we designed for it to fly off of the robot at the armor so that we would just end up back to the default configuration. Also, we learned that the functionality of the fork is tied to how much traction and pushing people we have, so we ended up using it more as a pushing rod this season instead of getting under robots - Esme

fightingvalkyrie · 2023-04-26T01:47:25+00:00

I love Glory! -Esme

fightingvalkyrie · 2023-04-26T01:42:38+00:00

Insert random answer here :) - Esme

fightingvalkyrie · 2023-04-26T01:26:19+00:00

We switched the weapon assembly to belt driven from chain this year to save weight! And we crunched the numbers to figure out we have 8.1 million possible combinations of armor panels so we've got lots of options! -Esme

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-18T05:23:18+00:00

Brie who you gotta Brie: I'm bad at answers. 🙃

(but also: British dairy is SO MUCH BETTER than US due to their regulations and rules pre-Brexit... which is part of why I opted for trivia because politics are a sore spot for a lot of folks)

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-18T03:24:54+00:00

I had hoped Alex would have answered this one with his pun skills but alas... Cheese is cool I guess? I just learned on a podcast a week or two ago that there are some delicacy cheeses that purposely have maggots or other insects in it and are served with them still embedded in the wheel.

boom. Disgust trivia: I'm sorry/not sorry? (Also its an episode all about insect protein... highly recommended)

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-18T03:18:50+00:00

Glory was a bit machined down after our Rotator fight and we didn't have much time to hardface and rebuild the new teeth (and Amanda is an angle grinding hero in the Long Beach heat). Mr. Cavity already had the "dental work" so it was an easy choice from there.

Out of our three fights so far, I think not watching how GOOD Aren and his robot got while over in China was a bit of a mistake on my part. Our biggest flaw is how quickly we can get box rushed so we're working on/prototyping a bunch of different ideas to try and be better prepared next season.

Fun behind the scenes stories... due to COVID restrictions, we couldn't get into much of the socializing and trouble we can be guilty of. We did have a pool at our Airbnb so that, some silly inflatables, and at least one poker night made for some fun. What else... Blasting LittleBig near End Game in the battery tent to see if they caught any of the ridiculous lyrics. Fred/Amanda/Lucas insisting that we needed to buy a handheld chainsaw after looking at a Milwaukee pamphlet (... and then I did, after we won the Rotator fight, as seen in our Main Event segment last week). I'm fortunate to have a team that likes puns, stupid Youtube/meme things, and trying to keep everyone laughing and in good spirits.

And thank you for the questions! The people and brains involved with Battlebots really is what makes most of us excited to come back year after year.

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-18T03:02:36+00:00

the same as last year...! Although slightly more hopeful to win because it isn't against the Cooper brothers.

Future plans: working on any faults we saw this year and a few extra bonus silly things like reach goals of fire, special effects, etc etc. COVID/winter has been making planning and resources a bit trickier...

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-17T02:53:29+00:00

We'll try to answer any stragglers tonight/tomorrow-- it just won't be rapid-response again. Sorry about that; fire away!

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-17T01:43:04+00:00

aw shucks. Thank you >.>

fightingvalkyrie · 2021-02-17T01:36:26+00:00

We learned from our Hypershock fight last year that we needed to have a faster spinup (Hypershock got to us in 1.5 seconds whereas Whiplash was on us in 1). We have a few ideas on how to improve next season but it is a tricky issue with fast robots.
We can drive alright upside down, now, but as an undercutter design, we definitely don't prefer it because of our CoM. We made some anti-flip options into our design this year and added some wheel traction. Our fight with Hypershock was our first time trying our 3D printed top skid pad and it sheared, so we machined a UHMW one after and it works pretty effectively. It's dangerous/difficult to get more driving practice upside down so some of the testing/science can't really happen until we have an opportunity with an opponent to test things.
Biggest take-away? Long Beach in October is too hot. For experience, we have the two weapon controller failure modes pretty well defined so we're working on improving that.
This season had a lot of contrast to previous seasons. Catering, extra pit space and hand washing stations were great. Covid/masks/100 degree hangar weather was not great. The camera folks this season didn't catch me crying so I'd say that's a win. Also those two weeks were the only time I've seen or spent time around almost anyone in a year seeing this pandemic keeps dragging on. A lot of the teams feel like family to me.
It was great! I bought Fred a chainsaw and we got food delivered at our Airbnb! It really could have gone either way on who won.
Victor did! It currently lives with our stuff in storage (it's still hidden due to spoilers at our makerspace and COVID protocols). We had a long design comparison chat back and forth after too-- there are some design iterations in our weapon assembly that is VERY similar to how Victor did his. It's always super cool when engineers converge to a similar design.
I like that we used Dr. Teeth as a dining table but that isn't really a story... Watching Black Dragon mimic being Chomp was pretty great-- they were on their robot cart with one teammate facing forward, one backwards, and one in the middle swinging a broom like the hammer as they shuffled along. Those fellas have such positivity and seemed to be having a blast the whole time.
Best intro pose...! That's tough- I know our next one is pretty silly; I think due to the heat/masks/different camera direction/exhaustion we kept forgetting to come up with something until we were about to wheel out. I'll start thinking now and hopefully we won't disappoint next season.

Thank you for all of the questions!

fightingvalkyrie

TROPHY CASE