To finally catch up, I also went to Capital Punishment.
Similar setup to Dojo, with 4 fights with a Swiss format. For fight 1, I drew Dolos. Last time we fought, I had a battery dented when he got round to my back, so for this fight I actually took off the rear armour to expose the back wheel so if I went up his forks, my rear wheel could still steer me and I could hopefully point the shield towards his weapon. And I think this actually worked, as all the impacts I could find were on the shield. The shield itself is also 6mm rather than 4mm at Burgh 4, so it also held up much better. He did manage to OOTA me which at the time we had no idea how it happened, but watching back the footage, I can see that because my rear wheel was exposed, the rollers on it allowed my back to slide up the OOTA wall easily when he pushed me against it!
Fight 2 was against Detonator. BIG drum spinner from Milo, so the hooked forks went on. For the most part, they did their job, letting me control the fight. I got a bit brave with the axe, on several occasions sending it towards the weapon system. I kept on missing anything important though, Detonator’s design leaves a large block of air in between the weapon and the rest of the bot which my axe kept finding! He also managed to get some big pops on me, including one that removed my rear armour - I had forgotten to reinsert the bolts holding it in after removing it for Dolos! The fight went to the judges, which I won. Brilliant fight either way, I think we were both very happy with it.
Fight 3 was against newcomer Pi, with a 4WD cam lifter. I was concerned about the length of the lifters, so I removed the rear armour again for more control. I got pinned early, but firing my axe let me slowly point towards them and start pecking away. An early shot took out one of the LED strips, and later got lodged in the casing for a servo, requiring an unstick. The pit got dropped, and I was nearly pushed in, but I fired the axe a bit more and managed to get away. Eventually, I got lodged again, this time in the thick top plate, so the fight went to the judges which I won.
Finally, I went up against Icebreaker. My forks worked quite well when we went head on, but axe shots to the body didn’t do anything, as he now runs carbon fibre lids. On a few occasions, the axe went into his weapon, sending me cartwheeling. Despite the punishment, the axe seemed to continue to work. He continued to juggle me several times, but I managed to self-right from all, save the last one, which ended with me with a dead weapon and over the pit.
Fire! Of course, I lost the fight here, but what an amazing fight. After evacuating the robot and getting it open, it turns out the weapon ESC let out the magic smoke. When packing up the robot afterwards, I noticed several SMD components at the bottom of the chassis - my working theory is (because this is also an older ESC that has seen many events), the repeated shocks from Icebreaker dislodged some chips and/or the power wires, which then caused a short!
Really loved the vibes from not having a bracket here, and I think these fights were a great sendoff to PMXL V2. For now, I’m going to be focusing on the new DJ2 for beetles, while this chassis gets a well-deserved retirement! Definitely not done with PMXL of course, but the next time I get back to it, I want to redo the CAD completely (i.e. proper F360 CAD).
