Can someone explain how the current rules came to be? Specifically 4 or less legs and no cam driven mechs? Those two rules seem to really raise the barrier of entry and push away a lot of people who would otherwise interested in competing. Why not have something like a light budget class to ease people into it without have to invest such a big chunk of money and time? I haven't really seen any budget friendly ways to compete.
I think the general idea is that the "cam driven" and "statically stable" designs are not in the spirit of Battletech-inspired warfare robots.
E g, the whole POINT is that it's not easy.
Yes, the competition is about true walking robots with guns that fight in an urban environment. One of the reasons for the competition is to promote development of more advanced walking machines. It sets a goal every year for everyone to complete new designs or upgrades to have better walking machines. The aspiration is to design evolve into more autonomous walking machines. Also, I would reason that a basic quadruped with AX12s doesn't really cost that much when you figure in the time involved. You can pick up AX12s pretty cheap at the garage sales and in 6 packs they are very reasonable. The time is the major investment. Tooling, labs, electronics, mechanisms, algorithms, software. Many people have built multiple machines and have invented quite a bit of stuff that did not exist. No one else is doing it. If is was easy then I'd get bored with it and be doing something else.
You can get help online via these forums. If you work at it steadily week in and week out you can be successful. The consequences will be many new skills and understanding that cannot be gained any other way. The actual Mechwarfare competition is just a way of sharing your results.
Ok, I think I get it a little better now. I'm not trying to say it should easy just that there could be an easier way to get into it. Maybe I'm just thinking about it too much like other hobbies like rc planes/cars/multicopters. All of those can be pretty easy and cheap to try out and get a feel for and build to get as complex/expensive as you want them to be.
Multicopters for example: you can try a free simulator or buy one for $20 and learn to fly and race against people online. Then you get a small style ready to fly kit with everything you need you to race indoors with other people for $150-$200. then you can build something bigger and upgrade your goggles, transmitter, charger etc. and you're designing quads to go 200+ mph or trying to push how many miles you can fly out.
Is there a reason mechs can't be like that? Have a lower barrier of entry that people can ease into and gradually move up to more challenging projects if they like it.
There has always been an open class where the leg rule has been removed, allowing 6 legs or wheels/tank treads. Unfortunately not many people have built for that class though. There was a tank at maker faire this year. I'm sure people would fight you in a fun match with their legged robots if you built an open class robot though.
Realistically, those "simpler classes" exist for cars/planes/quadcopters because the technology and market adoption of the "main" classes has gotten to the point where that makes sense.
Walking robots are as small now as quadcopters were in the year 2000 or so? Or RC planes in the 1960s? There aren't enough people who want to do it to warrant multiple classes, yet, and the technology for a "canned" simpler solution also doesn't really exist (at least in an affordable manner.)
I've seen some mention of the open class but wasn't sure what the rules were it just seemed like it got scrapped at some point.
I think with Jaimie's "spider tank" mechanism and how with 3d printing is becoming more accessible a cheap "canned" solution could be feasible. $100-200 vs twice that just for servos/motors.
In my mind it could be closer to size of the combat/battle bots as a hobby but maybe I'm just imagining more interest than there really is.
How many events do y'all typically attend in a year?
There's typically one event in a year :-)
(Except for R-team, which has an Arizona Garage League)
Alright thanks for the info guys, I have couple ideas to work on and we'll see if they go anywhere.
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