Okay, so this has nothing to do with Combat Robots: I pre-ordered a 32GB Microsoft Surface with Windows RT a couple of weeks ago, and it showed up (on time) last Friday. Since then I've been playing with it, and one of the first things I noticed was that less than 20GB of the 32GB SSD was available for data. Luckily, though, I had ordered a 64GB microSD card from Amazon earlier last week, when they had them on sale as the Gold Box deal of the day. [More]

Back at Motorama 2012 we debuted a new fairyweight, Trancendental Terror 1.0, with a titanium spinning blade attached directly to the motor driving it. It was a decent design, but it had one fatal flaw - it wasn't invertible, and lost two out of three matches by being flipped. We decided to see if we could tweak the design to make it invertible. [More]

Malicious Mule did really well in Lauren's hands at Motorama 2012, and really poorly in Toni's hands at Franklin Cup 2012. The next competition for us will be Motorama 2013, so we're going to tweak the antweight's design one more time to try and work out the issues we've had at the two events. [More]

One of the things we really wanted in both Intrusive Interloper 2.0 and Steel Stiletto for the Franklin Cup competition was a working gyro to help with the driveablility of both 'bots, but after playing with them during the build process, we just couldn't get them working, so we left them out. [More]

We had high hopes for Poor Punctuation 2.0 when we took it to Motorama 2012, but those hopes were quickly dashed by a malfunctioning weapon and some nasty hits from Gyroscopic. We tried to work out how to redesign the 'bot for the Franklin Cup 2012, but couldn't figure out how to get it underweight, so we shelved it. [More]

Click through to read our competition report for NERC's Franklin Cup 2012 - spoiler alert: there are trophies involved! [More]

We need to stuff a bunch of things into cases and head to the airport, but before we do that, here's a quick shot of the fleet for Franklin. Hit Back after viewing an image. Here's the fleet as it stands right now (clockwise-ish from the top: Formidable Fustigator 2.0 - 30lb Featherweight, Malici... [More]

This is our last build day before NERC's Franklin Cup 2012, and we have three working 'bots, one that needs tweaking, and one that still has a fair amount to be done. Time to get cracking! [More]

We actually took the night off last night, because (a) we were tired, and (b) we have two full build days before we have to pack up and head to Philadelphia. This morning we hit the ground running, to see how close we could get to finishing the rebuild of Nihilistic Naysayer 2.0 [More]

Phew! We have three 'bots ready for NERC's Franklin Cup this coming Saturday, and one more missing a wheel but essentially done. Give that we have three and a half evenings plus one day of build time left, we need to decide what we want to focus on: antweight or hobbyweight? [More]

After yesterday we knew we're close with the beetleweight Belligerent Battler 0.9 so first out the gate this evening is to wrap this 'bot up. We have some finessing of the chassis and the wiring to do. [More]