BattleBots & ESPN Strike TV Deal 120
NMajik writes "Although BattleBots has been largely removed from the public eye since episodes stopped airing years ago, a new deal has recently been struck with ESPN to return combat robots to the living room. Episodes will be broadcast as a series on ESPNU and ESPN2 after filmed at the competition in June 2008. This is the first notable progress towards televised combat robotics in years."
Ah but it's fun to speculate... (Score:3, Interesting)
About time! (Score:5, Interesting)
The humor was funny, but the sportscasting was awful. Weird stats, rarly any good discussion over what happened or any more details. The after-fight interviews were pretty much just, "How did you feel about winning?". And the crazy stats and numbers rarely had any relation to the judges scores, which were glossed over and never explained.
We always wished ESPN would have shown it.. THEY at least know how to host a sporting event. Hopefully they will treat Battle Bots just like any other sport this time around, explaining judge decisions, giving people a better idea of why someone wins, focusing on the exciting parts more than long, long clips about someones garage.
Here's to hoping we get lucky and ESPN doesn't screw it up this time around.
Honestly... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not robots (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About time! (Score:5, Interesting)
If ESPN treats the sport at least half as well as NBC did with American Gladiators, We may be in for a treat!
ESPN has a rep to keep up, and sports show crews tend to be fanatics. So there is much upside.
Re:boring (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ah but it's fun to speculate... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:About time! (Score:3, Interesting)
A rep to keep up? They show Scrabble tournaments!!! I saw a dominoes tourney on there once. I've also seen darts and billiards. If you've seen any of those, you'd notice the coverage crews were anything but fanatic or even enthusiastic.
Re:Ah but it's fun to speculate... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think more important than what's allowed on the robots is what kind of surface will they be playing on. When they're played on very smooth, very flat surfaces, it becomes all about wedges and flippers. Every robot has a skirt with less than 1cm clearance on all sides, and the winners are the ones that can slip under that skirt.
If they changed it so that the games were played on uneven, non smooth surfaces, maybe even some dirt/grass, water, etc. you'd have to have exposed wheels / tracks. Wedges / flippers would no longer have a massive advantage.
Survival of the fittest in robot fighting competitions is, like all other survival of the fittest contests, based on the environment. If the environment is varied enough that one niche player can't dominate everything, you'll get much more interesting fights, and much more variety in design.
Re:How to improve the show (Score:-1, Interesting)
I agree. I saw several of the champion bots -- like Vlad the Impaler -- used metal skirts around their bot to protect from flipping, AND the bot could operate upside-down if it actually did get flipped.
Ziggo was really effective against flippers and wedges. I think the bot won the Gold Nut three times for the light-weight division. He was a little bot with a spinning shell that had little blocks welded on the top, looked like an inverted dull blender. Whenever a wedge or a flipper even got near Ziggo to flip it, they just got pounded by the spinning top and thrown aside; usually quite spectacularly.
Re:How to improve the show (Score:2, Interesting)
1: It's a legitimate concern, one that crops up time and again in the builder community. The simple answer is, basically nothing can be done about it. We want to encourage everyone to join the sport, including people who don't have an extreme amount of technical skill, and a wesgebot is the simplest kind to build. Many teams build a wedge for their first robot, just to "learn the ropes", and then go on to build other more complex and interesting designs. We can't get rid of the wedges without scaring new competitors off, and in the end, I think it's worth it.
However, Re: the hydraulic arm, you're misunderstanding a couple things. First, I only know of two robots in the entire sport that ever used real hydraulics (not to say there aren't more, but it's extremely rare). You're probably thing either of pneumatics, or, more commonly, just regular linear electric actuators. The former is very hard to use and should never be denigrated as too easy (or boring for that matter--see Inertia Labs, The Judge and Ziggy, for example). The latter is relatively easy, but see above, and give the team credit for making a 'bot that actually does something instead of being a totally basic ramming wedge.
2: Time is money. Everyone would like to have more matches and more fighting, but it isn't cheap to run a tournament, and it isn't cheap for the teams to be at the tournament competing. Of course, better prizes and more publicity for sponsorship would fix some of this.
2.1: Yes. Most tournaments these days have very minimalist arenas, and most builders like it that way.
3: Yes.
4: Are you male? EVERYTHING needs bikini babes.
5: If ESPN can afford it, sure. but I doubt they're willing to shell out. On the other hand, ESPN coverage will be a tremendous boon for sponsorship deals. Nobody is sponsoring these days (even though for most companies a significant sponsorship deal would be a drop in the bucket) because nobody sees the competitions, but international coverage would certainly do the trick.
6: They'd have to calibrated to each other i.e. weight class AND price. I could easily make an indestructible half-ton wedge for $10k, and that would be stupid.
For my own part, I'm worried about the experimental class. As someone who has seen and been close to these things, the current crop of superheavyweight shell spinner robots genuinely scare me. In all honesty, the current standards of arena design are already not totally safe for these things to be fighting in. Any significantly larger version of these robots with the same design, which seems probable, would be quite simply a danger to the audience and everyone else around it, even within the arena. Now, I'm all for Mechadon coming out of retirement, but if I was in charge, I wouldn't let (for example) a 500-pound shell spinner actually fight in anything resembling a conventional arena.