SCAR: Melee at the Meadery

I'm writing this one way after the event, so my memory's gonna be fuzzy on a few things. At first I didn't think it was recorded so wasn't going to write an update at all, but it turns out Smashbotz is rebranding to SCAR (Southern California Attack Robots), and there's an there's an all new Twitch channel that has the whole event!

Pinout is coming with an all new last minute design and... during safety I connected the battery backwards which melted the drive ESC. The spare I brought needed to be soldered up from scratch, so I decided to withdraw before the brackets were made to avoid giving anyone byes since I was pretty sure I couldn't get it done in time. Better luck next time Pinout, I had low hopes for you.

Netsplit is mostly the same with two minor differences. It's now running Turnabot "spicy" N10 motors, and has an aluminum disc holding the weapon bar on. In testing having a metal weapon button resulted in more dead weapon motors, but in practice the weapon motors die all the time anyway, so I hoped this help with the verts that have a habit of knocking my weapon bar off without damaging the motor. I'm also not running the nylon chassis at all in this competition since I'm not sure where I put it.

Lets get right into it with Netsplit vs Meteor.

Easily one of the most worrying bots for me here today, and there were three copies in the bracket! Netsplit doesn't really have an answer for hard-hitting verts besides hoping for favorable weapon to weapon hits.

Once he Did the Thing I backed off. Normally I'd try to keep the fight going if it's early in the day and in the first half of the fight... but like I said there were three copies of this robot in the bracket. I'll take the win.

Next fight is against Max Versmacken (but the robot was black and silver... maybe it should've been Lewis Hammerton?):

I really like the look of this robot and felt a little bad about what I had to do, but this is the ideal matchup for Netsplit. I ran the ring spinner because I didn't have another spinner to worry about, so I'm hitting incredibly hard here. As Prof Mason said, Netsplit did exactly what it was designed to do. Fun fight.

After that is Red Rocket:

I'd beaten Red Rocket twice before, but once was a driver error and once was breaking off one of their sticks back when they were carbon fiber, and both times I lost at least one drive motor. Unfortunately, it looks like they've addressed both of those issues while Netsplit... hasn't changed. I lost the "wrong" drive motor this time for the direction the weapon was spinning in, so it wasn't very controllable. The motors ended up fine and reusable thankfully, but that fight knocks me into the losers bracket. I still have the best of three though!

Next I meet Meteor again in the losers bracket. There was a video issue here so no footage. Despite taking some damage Netsplit won via a split decision.

And finally is a fight with Titan, an identical copy of Meteor:

Netsplit was pretty badly damaged after Meteor so went into this fight with glue still drying and a few strategic zip ties. Titan's driver is a bit more experienced and more controlled than Meteor, and I'd barely eeked out wins against that bot, so the best I could hope for going into this fight was losing spectacularly. I'd say I succeeded on that point. Netsplit has only been fully delidded a couple times and it's always a wonderful sight, I love sliding past 3 minutes with everyone wondering "how can that thing still drive?" Needless to say, I lost the JD. 

Once again a podium finish slips out of my grasp. Netsplit finishes in 4th. Maybe next time!

A few of my fights made the SCAR Greatest hits for this event, so I'll leave you with that: