krtwood

One advantage of a battery box is you can adjust the weight inside of it without changing anything else. Also the bigger the weapon is the greater the chances of actually hitting something. While you might mainly be only pushing the other bot away (and your own bot in the opposite direction) you are at least getting in a hit and hopefully keeping them away and not able to get close enough to hit you too. Plus there is the psychological effect to consider. A big weapon looks like it's going to do damage and our bots are not actually going to fight each other. So it's as much a question of how people are going to imagine what the bot can do as what it can actually do.

MUAHAHAHA! When in doubt, add more motors! I didn't think four XLs would run off one receiver but it does. I have 2 V1 and 2 V2 receivers and using one of the V2s for the drive so I would have had to use two V1s if it was going to be two. Tried it off of the one V2 that was already there and it worked. It does of course cut out when the spinner gets stalled but I don't see that as a bad thing. It spins fast enough now that you think twice about sticking your hand in the way of it. That's all I really wanted.

I think it turns quite well for what it is. It pivots around the axis of the spinner. If it had wheels out in the front they would reduce the reach of the spinner. If you don't think two motors is a good idea you aren't going to like four motors :) Realistically it's much easier to make a strong chassis that will not come apart than it is to make a weapon that can do any real damage. We would all be better off making solid bricks of liftarms that ram into each other but where is the fun in that? So if you are going to make a weapon then it doesn't make sense to me to put more power into moving the bot around than you do into moving the weapon. I did think about having two motors driving the spinner from the top and two motors driving from below but the way things worked out there was no room. I have some ideas on reworking the superstructure. With the cage removed from around the motors the length of the bot is now down to around 35L. I think if I make the upper beam more rigid and extend it past the back of the bot I can hang a battery box at the end as a counterweight. Then I can either remove a battery box from the base or add two more motors. It's more solid than it looks in the back. I don't think you can see all the bracing in the back in the pictures. The two vertical supports are actually being pulled in so they pinch the superstructure. There is more movement at the pivot point in the front than in the back. I think it would be better to have a couple of small turntables instead of just pins. Honestly I never considered anything else. It got the gear reduction and the motors turned 90 degrees so it would fit. I had been trying to make the battery boxes removable so there is some wasted space in the middle of the bot. I could open up more space but I doubt I will have time to rework the base very much Thank you! I am better at making things in wood than in lego, but it is easier to fix your mistakes :) The weight is about 2.5 kg right now. Thanks. There are some very effective Battlebots, like Minotaur, that have hardly any reach at all. The spinner can reach between 14L and 12L depending on how far off center the other bot is, which I think is pretty respectable. The crown stuck out much further than that but it was really pretty indestructible.

Let's start of showing you where I'm at now, then we'll talk about where I was and why that didn't work. The weapon is a horizontal spinner, driven directly by two XL motors, with two loaded battery boxes in the blade. I tried a couple variations of using belts and clutch gears to protect the motors but none of that really worked. Ultimately it's remote controlled so the driver is the clutch gear, I suppose. Because the spinner is fairly high off the ground, higher than I figure many of the other bots will be, I needed some way to reach out and touch those little guys. I was originally thinking of doing a retractable ramp that would extend out from the middle of the bot and force them up into the spinner. Then I decided to use linear actuators at the back and pivot the whole superstructure down. At maximum lift the blade gets within 4L of the ground. This approach sacrifices a lot of rigidity of the superstructure. Well, it's still rigid, but it is not solidly connected to the body. This means some of the impact when the spinner connects is going to be lost, but I like the idea of being able to target specific heights on the other bot. I think it's a worthy trade-off. When at max lift the bottom front edge of the superstructure rests on the top front of the base to help with this, as well as a lot of bracing on the vertical guides on either side of the superstructure. A side effect is that the superstructure is easily detached from the base with the removal of two pins, two 3L thin liftarms, and one electrical connection. I originally intended all the RC receivers to be in the back of the superstructure but once I added the lifting feature that would have required a ridiculous number of extension cables that I don't have. So I put one on either side of the base and tried to make it not look too out of place. The long panels unfortunately can't be any higher without getting brushed by the spinner. Drive is two L motors through worm gears, so it's not a speedy bot. The three wheel design with a lot of the weight on the third wheel almost directly under the center of the spinner makes it able to rotate almost in place. The plan is keep the other bot in front of you and let them come to you. It just has to be able to spin faster than they can drive around. Lift mechanism is an M motor. The base is pretty solid other than a few decorative fill in pieces. Battery boxes are integral but you can replace the batteries just by removing the black 15L liftarms on the top. Now we come to my tale of woe. The bot's name was supposed to be "The King". Bricklinked a bunch of 3L axles and yellow half bushes to make its crown. Two sets of inverted tracks mounted on springs to soften any blows. The King was quite proud of his sapphire in its bezel. The color cast by the dark trans blue on the yellow was the inspiration for using bright green on the base. There was just one slight problem once all the pieces came in and the crown was complete. Too much weight on the turntables. I guess I should have known. I tried running a liftarm inside the two turntables to support weight very early on in the build but that actually made it much worse. Anyway, without any complex drivetrain to protect the crown was much bigger than it needed to be and kind of pointless so its not the end of the world. It had personality though. So I changed the name to Regicide because The King is dead. Now I have to come up with something much lighter to make the top look finished. I'm not sure if I will even keep the yellow circle. Getting rid of all that would bring the weight down a lot and speed up the spinner. I have a bunch of the shorter bright green panels I could do something with. Oh, it was 45x45x40 with the crown. Now I think it's around 45x40x32.

That's cool and looks great! I think this style of low and fast bot would be troublesome for my bot. 45x45x45 is 91125 L^3 37x26x9 is 8658 L^3. So it's less than 10% of the available volume. There will be some much bigger bots :)

We're thinking about it all wrong. Rather than disable the other bot disable the other operator. Color vomit your bot so badly that they rage quit the match before it even starts. Hmm, that might backfire and they become extra determined to destroy it.

You could build a giant cube that opens up and surrounds the other bot to block its IR signals. My original thought was to make a big expanding claw that would grab the other bot and draw it into my bot's weapon but I changed my mind and went with something more conventional and robust.

The larger wings and horizontal stabilizers are a big improvement. The angle of the leading edge of the wing should really be steeper than that to look like the F-35 though.

I'm assuming it has to be a single bot, not multiple bots that fit in the 45L cube. Could it have a hangar that a smaller bot drives out of and runs independently? Can it intentionally drop unpowerred parts of itself? What does the arena they are hypothetically fighting in look like? Is the floor a flat hard surface? Are there obstacles or hazards in the arena? On Battlebots the bots are often disabled not by the other bot but by the other bot putting them in a position on the hazards in the arena they can't get out of even though they are still working.

The jet is another model, like last year's tractor, where I wonder why they felt the need to make this PF. I realize it fills the spot of the 1H helicopters and cargo plane that had PF so I guess they have a slot where the designer must build something aeronautical with PF for a certain price point. But the jet clearly suffers for it, and for what? So that fan blades inside of the model that you can't really see will spin? Other than that there is nothing this model does that couldn't be done just as well, if not better, manually. I'll give it this much though. The stubby wings make it so you can actually display it on a shelf like most other models, unlike the cargo plane. But they could have borrowed the folding wings of the navy version for that. It did allow them to avoid dealing with the problem that the angled panels are just the wrong angle for the wings. I would have liked to see the designer come up with a real solution, and maybe we will see some from the AFOLs.

Have 4 (or more) liftarms connected around an axle. The faster the axle spins the further out the liftarms are going to go. The end of the liftarms passing through a window is your speed indicator. Balance the weight of the liftarms and the speed of the axle.

It's not just a castle, but the most intricate castle we're likely to ever see. Once your bravest knights have driven out the enormous rodents that are inhabiting it and the castle has been purged of all heretical artifacts, your masons can step in and modify it into the envy of every other faction. If you only look at things for what they are not instead of what they are and what they could be then you will never be satisfied with anything. If you've been holding out for a set that says "Castle" on it then you should have plenty of money saved up and the cost won't be problem. Then later on when new Castle sets do show up you'll be able to populate it with the new figures from the smaller sets.

I think if you had teams of two, each with a BWE and two dump trucks and you had a pile of bricks/loose dirt and a hole and you had to get your BWE across the hole that could be fun.

"I think people were drawn to both these sets because they are full RC covering the important set functions." And yet invariably when one of those sets is released it's immediately modded into an "ultimate" version with more motors or a better steering mechanism.

I didn't get what they meant by "Mobil" either. It makes it sound like all they had were 4x4 technic bricks and had to cut them to make other sizes. If that's what they had to work with to begin with why didn't that size ever make it into a set?

Wouldn't they at least have 3d printed non-functional versions of the motors?

When you look at the BWE and Porsche next to each other the BWE doesn't seem so big. We don't know what the parts count of the Porsche is, or whether it has RC or how many motors. But it's pretty darn big and it's not a skeleton of a car. It's pretty dense. If you didn't know the parts count of the BWE which one would you think was more expensive based on that picture? We have conflicting info on the pricing and really even at $325 USD it's 8.2 cents a part. I think it's actually cheaper if it's $325 instead of $240 so I don't buy two of them ;)

Well, if it had no crane people would complain that it didn't have enough functions. However as it is it would have made more sense as the 1H flagship. Considering it's coming out alongside two larger and more expensive flagships, had they ditched the crane and the motor and battery box (make it PF ready) they could have hit a lower price that would make more sense in the context of the rest of the sets being released. I think a lot of people are going to be deciding between which set they want to buy rather than picking up this one on top of a flagship set because they just want the tires.

I think it would look better with the same arch over the front wheels as over the rear wheels. Okay it's just straight/sloped on the actual car there, but it's straight at the rear too.

That thing is just not safe for hamsters to be around. I think a tunnel boring machine would be a great C model based around those circular gears.

At the end of the conveyor have a sloping chute with a large turntable at each end and the bricks pass through the center in a channel only slightly taller than the bricks. If it's already right side up it passes through. If not it's stopped and the chute rotates 180 degrees and then it's released.

I was expecting a furry supercar for some reason.

This is pretty much what I was hoping for from TLG for an official set this year! It looks way better than the Arocs, IMO.

I think it's funny that I wanted a fire truck for the flagship and we're getting a fire plane and a dump truck. So close, but so very far away. Any idea when we're going to see 42039 in the US? Everything else from 1H is out but that set.

You might try some technic sets. The way they generally go together with pins instead of studs makes them a little more robust, but can also be harder to put together in the first place.