Thread for silly questions about rules!

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

It is exceptionally rare that a fight goes beyond 2 and a half minutes, especially with a spinner involved. Not impossible though.

[Shakey]

Silly question:

Why do we have the holding rule (I'm not thinking of the pinning part of it here) but just the hold. Surely if you manage to get a good grab on someone you shouldn't have to release? Like if you flip someone over they don't get righted after 20 seconds. If you worked to get that grab I don't see why it can't be held indefinitely.

[BeligerAnt]

I suspect that was one of the original rules inherited from Robot Wars, like all the "no glue-based weapons" etc.
But it's been there for as long as I can remember so we might need to ask PeteC or Oliver for the origin...

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

I seem to remember it being something about grabbers at the time (particularly Anteater) could latch onto an opponent but then not really go anywhere except round in circles, so rather than just doing that til time ran out it was ruled they had to let go and try again. Still kind of relevant today. I've built grabbers and sometimes I could just latch onto the opponent so neither of us could move much and run the clock out.

[Shakey]

I can see that, though I feel the time limit is too short really.

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

I always found with my grabber, raising it up ever so slightly before clamping back down got me through this anyway.

[Hogi]

thunderstrike is one of few grabbers currently running in antweights and i can usually push the opponent once i've grabbed it but sometimes it is rather difficult especially if the opponent's wheels are still on the ground so they can put up a fight. i am going to try and build a nanoweight grabber that will feature in an antweight clusterbot ( three botlet with transit ant and this too shall fail ) and the aim of having that in the clusterbot will be to try and restrict the opponent's maneuverability by holding so that transit ant can push it off the arena. it'll be interesting to see if that's effective or not.

[Rapidrory]

This is regarding the rules on AWS Arenas..

I know what it says about minimum drop offs etc, but would anyone have a problem if I were to build an arena with 4 walls and a pit (a bit like the beetle arena) for the AWS I'm planning to hold in the summer? It would certainly make for a different fight style and would change up the balance between the effectiveness of different designs. As there'll be less strict time constraints, it shouldn't matter if it draws out fights a bit..
But yeah, I just felt I should ask about it first...

[BeligerAnt]

The rules simply say that there has to be 50% of the perimeter that is open. That could be inner or outer perimeter, but the maths means that you can't achieve 50% soley on the inside!

Even if you choose to simply ignore the rules, a pit represents a very small "drop-off" area compared to (parts of) two or more edges.

If you were to add a pit I would say that you would have to also have low walls round the arena and a ditch beyond (to allow some chance of OOTA wins) otherwise far too many fights would drag on to the full 3 minutes and require a judges decision. It could all get a bit boring...

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

If the proposed rule wording change of "at least 50%" to "a pre-accepted amount" goes ahead it would be fine. I would much prefer a pit and four full walls. It could stop spinners flying out more often for one, and rely more on driving skills than accidents for an out. I think the pit would have to be fairly large though. Maybe it could be at the edge of the arena so that the fighting surface is sort of square horseshoe shaped? But no, I certainly wouldn't object.

I don't like the low walls thing though. I've expressed this many times before, low walls favour flippers and lifters who can fire you over them without issue, whereas someone with a crusher, for example, cant use it. A drop off to me should be useable by every robot or no robots at all, not favoured to a certain type.