Event Report – BITB4
For those of you that missed it, the full event is available here: BITB4 Livestream And I’ll be timestamping each of Doctor Sweep’s fights as we go.
And thus the day of the event came. We woke up that morning in a Premier Inn accompanied by a suitcase of parts and tools (plus one brilliantly Steven King adorned dustpan), and made our way to the venue.
Now I’ll admit; not having been anywhere like this since the pre-pandemic times, and never in beetleweights, I was very nervous. But was quickly reminded of just how wonderful this insane little hobby can be, surrounded by wonderfully helpful staff, incredibly friendly competitors and friends both old and new.
Tech checks have always been pretty painless for me, after all, most of my robots lack the weapon part that requires the extra safety precautions. So with that quickly passed I switched on for a quick run in the test box… and realised the dustpan had warped when I took the front bulkhead out and left me with a lovely wobble between one side drive freewheeling in the air or half the dustpan edge aiming skywards. Not to worry! A good few minutes of bending by hand and gentle persuasion with a hammer put that right and left us with a little time to sit and chat before the first fights were announced.
I took this opportunity to fill my wonderful girlfriend, Bekki,(who was nice enough to let me fill her car with bot bits) in on a few of the rules of our sport as well as take a quick wander round to see what devilishly destructive machines we could come up against. Once she had come to terms with the fact that we had brought a B&Q dustpan to a metaphorical gun fight, she was quick to deduce that our worst fear could be overhead weapons. After all, 10mm HDPE front and back, and the wheels covering the side, meant the top was the only part of the pan that wasn’t reinforced. Enter: The Barber Surgeon.
Fight 1 – The Barber Surgeon (57:10)
Whelp, I thought, trial by fire is always fun. The overhead hammer saw was exactly the thing to put Doctor Sweep to the test, not to mention my driving skill.
For the first minute of the fight I was mostly getting the hang of both Doctor Sweep’s driving characteristics (a little slower than I had hoped due to the wheels rubbing against the body) and facing an omni-drive bot with its unnerving ability to strafe and keep the scary spinner facing forward at all times.
A couple moments of good control from Doctor Sweep were mostly overshadowed by The Barber Surgeon’s forks nullifying the dustpan and a few glancing blows from their weapon as I aimed to keep the pan forward and them at a distance. That is until a lovely shot from the hammer saw pierced the pan and stuck the two bots together, forcing an unstick.
One reset later we charged back in, aiming to corral The Barber Surgeon towards the pit until one driving mistake from me gave them the opportunity they’d been waiting for. In an aptly surgical move, Doctor Sweep found itself picked up on the forks, slammed into the wall, hit from above and POP!, the link bounced to the floor and left us dead in the water.
I’m a little disappointed I didn’t make it the final 12 or so seconds to a judge’s decision but ultimately the right bot won and I was surprisingly in mostly one piece.
Fight 2 – Daisy (the Cow) (2:49:53)
Daisy (the Cow) is just a lovely bit of engineering, a shuffler with a 4-bar lifter, I adore it. I also felt I might stand a little more chance than against a few of the more dangerous weapons in the competition.
I feel I had the better of the control battle early on in the fight, scooping them into the dustpan more often than not and getting around to their sides. Unfortunately Daisy is just wider than the scoop, so still had one side of its drive on the floor to leave us going around in circles rather than being able to push them where we wanted. So I went for the pit activation as soon as possible, realising it was the only chance of a knockout for either of us.
The robot gods of course punished me for my hubris, with Daisy able to damage the front edge of the pan, taking away Doctor Sweep’s control. And after a quick back and forth with both of us hanging a wheel (or shuffler) over oblivion, Daisy (the Cow) proved to be the better driver on the day and dumped the dustpan into the pit.
0-2, but with only minor damage I was pleasantly surprised with how the day was going.
Fight 3 – Shenaniganizer (3:37:20)
Now this was exciting for me. Doctor Sweep was getting the full range of testing today, first an overhead, then a control bot, now finally a horizontal (plus its mini bot).
The strategy when fighting a spinner is fairly simple, smother it and don’t let it spin up. When you’ve got 10mm HDPE as a front bulkhead the choice becomes even simpler, don’t let go of the move forward stick.
So that’s what I did, and it worked! Temporarily.
As is usually the case, the spinner will eventually get spun up and then you’re in trouble. It just so happened that only 10 seconds after I was internally celebrating pinning Shenaniganizer against the wall, it spun up and knocked Doctor Sweep back with a couple small hits. Then dug its tooth into the side of the dustpan and physics took over. I was beached upside down with no way to self right. Curse the first bot I’ve ever built that isn’t invertible (unless you count that one time I brought a FlyMo to Extreme Robots). Despite my taunting to hit me again, Shenaniganizer chose to be sensible and let the Doctor get counted out, and in turn counting us out of the competition.
This is broadly how I had expected the day to go, three losses and quickly eliminated from the top 16. That’s okay, I got everything I wanted out of the day. Saw some lovely people and reminded myself why I started doing this in the first place. Certainly won’t be 4 years before I compete again, in fact I-
What? Wait, I’m sorry? There’s a tag team competition for anyone eliminated? Cancel the sentimental ending, there’s more bot bashing to be done.
Team Fight 1 – w/Bulletpoint Onryo vs Sabertooth and Dearc (5:48:22)
About 10 minutes before the Team fights began I turned to my girlfriend and said “How about you drive this team fights?” Baring in mind she had not only never driven Doctor Sweep but never driven any bot of any kind before, and there was no test box big enough to do more than move a few inches.
What’s the worst than can happen. It’s not like we could get drawn against a meltybrain that’s arguably the biggest spinner in the field, right…
Taking inspiration from my attempt against Shenaniganizer earlier, Bekki chose to drive into Sabertooth as much as possible. Making the good point that the front half of our dustpan by area is unnecessary in terms of functional movement, and besides, we brought three of the damn things and haven’t even broken the first one yet.
This was actually working relatively well until Doctor Sweep got separated from Sabertooth by Dearc and Bulletpoint who were busy scrapping away. Giving Sabertooth enough time to… ricochet off a wall, hit its own teammate and pile all three other bots up in such a way that the hand of Dave was once again required to separate a fight.
With Dearc unresponsive on the restart Bulletpoint and Doctor Sweep set their sights on Sabertooth. Bulletpoint lost a wheel to the mighty melty. Before the Doctor became a dentist, breaking Sabertooth’s tooth as the old hit your fist with my face strategy paid off, sending one of our opponents weapons flying across the arena.
Some excellent teamwork saw Sabertooth pinned between the two of us before it bounced its way across the arena and into the pit.
We won? We won!
Team Fight 2 – w/Bulletpoint Onryo vs Chris Griffin 2 & Baby Dead Bod (6:37:10)
What’s better than one big spinner? That’s right! 2 big spinners.
I’ll admit, when Baby Dead Bod’s wheel fell off before the fight started I began to dream a little. Could this little dustpan and it’s well engineered teammate make their way to the Teams final? Could they win it all?
Nope. Not 30 seconds in two large discs had disintegrated Doctor Sweep’s wheels, smashed both sides of the dustpan and removed the rear wheels from Bulletpoint. Nice simple work from two big weapons, exactly what you’d expect and what I’d been hoping for when we entered the teams tournament.
Overall I learned and relearned a lot at BITB4. Most surprisingly it turns out a cheap dustpan can survive 5 fights. Honestly with a little hammering back into shape I could probably keep using the same chassis… I won’t, but I could.
I’ve now got a bit of time until the next event in Scotland is announced to plan moving forward. I’d like to keep Doctor Sweep running, perhaps this version will continue to exist as a reserve/loan bot. But for the future I’d like to turn this design into something potentially competitive. So it’s off to do a load of sketches I go before making a go of learning this ‘Computer Aided Design’ thing I’ve heard so much about.
We did half the sentimental bit earlier, so I’ll just say thank you BITB4. See you next time
