Vegas - horizontal spinner combat robot

As LEGO competitions go some countries have truck trial, some have races and UK has... Robot Combat.

Without dwelling on the history of the serieses called "Robot Wars", "BattleBots" and spin-offs of those this is the prevailing (only?) activity coming close to a competition involving LEGO Technic in the UK. Seeing as I am competetive I decided to give it a go myself.

After a year or so or experimenting I came up with a design that works reasonably well, even wining some fights:

VEGAS - a horizontal spinner

Using the wheel from the robot that beat me (designed originally by Nick Cowen)  I choose to go with horizontal power, as I liked the idea of ripping wheels off the opponents. 

Vegas was built to "old rule set" of size being less than 32x32x32 stud and weight below 1kg, In the current ruleset (published on 28/12/2024) it sits comfortably in Tier 3 due to use of MouldKing motors and MouldKing 4.0 battery (some people have fitted a 6.0 battery, but MODS of Vegas are a story for another post, or at least a separate comment... we'll get to it).

The most technical aspect of the weapon wheel is the friction clutch using 2x 8t gears, 24t gear and 2x friction pins:

The clutch is advisable (I'd have said "necessary" but I have seen robots without it do very well since...) to reduce the stress of the buggy motor powering the weapon. This clutch is present twice in the wheel, allowing to gather sufficient kinetic energy for good hits while protecting the buggy motor. In the two years I run Vegas so far I did not experience a single issue with the weapon wheel, the motor or the gears in clutch skipping/being shattered etc. 

The name, colour choices for the robot and the wheel is a sum of two inspirations: Las Vegas (where BattleBots were relocated from NYC after 2nd season) and casinos (which is a derivative of Las vegas anyways...). Las Vegas, Casinos so the wheel is coloured to resemble a roulette wheel to the best of my ability in the functional context of a combat robot:

Okay... the tooth is WeBrick, not LEGO because they refuse to release it in white (or did at the time of designing this bot) 

Next interesting feature is the self-righting mechanism. The green lid (imitating the roulette table) is suspended of a liftarm, which driven by a PF XL motor, geared down 3.2 times, allows Vegas to return to wheels down position, when the opponent tries to flip it. It has so much force/froction that I need to lift it via software fro any repairs below the lid...

Drive of the wheels is nothing special. Bare standard for the competition - one PF L motor per wheel, here geared down 1.6 times in the well know portal hub part.

That's all very well - but how does it work?

I'll let some of the fights from this year speak for me (before Ill clear the editing/upload backlog of fights from October/November):
 

Reading Brick Show 2024

June Jeopardy 2024

Due to popular demand I created instructions available on Rebrickable and a ready to run kit with help of LesDIY

I do hope you will like it as well, and if you have seen it on a robot combat event - let me know what you  thought of it!