It’s time for another June NHRL! After the May Pro Tour event there wasn’t much to fix on the robot. Though it lost out, the machine showed great promise so it was time to test it out against a wide range of designs in the largest 30lb field in the season so far!
Since the robot was largely unaffected there wasn’t much lead-up to the event. As such, let’s dive into the fights!
Synthesis 30
Synthesis 30 was a machine closely related to the evolutions of Phenomenon and Vorion. As a fellow wide, tall vertical spinner its been an effective mirror to determine how important little details are. When V3 was designed, Synthesis was a robot it was designed to handle with details such as the lifting forks meant to lead first interactions and wedgelets designed to resist long forks. Even the lighter weapon was designed to support control and allow chaining hits. The fight against Overlord gave some good signs, time to see if lightning strikes twice.
First Hits
From the start Phenomenon was moving like a demon. It completely outpaced Synth from the gate and started laying into it with shots. The balance of the carbon fiber lifting arms were on display quickly. While stiff enough to act as effective forks, their relative fragility meant one was easily broken off by a glancing hit. This was acceptable as almost no materials at a reasonable mass would have resisted a shot from that blade. Instead, it broke off cleanly at the joint leaving just enough for self-righting and not inhibiting the blade. Even so, attempts at steel will be made in the future as allowed as the utility of the arms can’t be understated.
Even after losing both arms, Phenomenon was still doing an excellent job controlling Synthesis. The wedgelets on the front were excellent at allowing the ground game to control Synthesis while, most critically, leaving plenty of reach for the blade. I want the weapon system to hit the other robot so allowing it to do it while keeping stable was always a critical design goal. Seems like its done its thing.
The Stick
TPU giveth and TPU taketh away. It’s important to note this is not a slant against Synthesis; it is clearly not its fault that its TPU was torn off so cleanly and locked up the blade. At the same time, it is not good to be at the mercy of the opponent’s print settings for weapon functionality. Due to the new blade having a toothed counterweight that is sharp and should rarely dull from opponents’ impacts, it poses a natural catch point different from V2’s weapon. In the next version of the blades this may play more of a role.
A lesser known detail is the usefulness of the horns! Here you can see it tipped up but instead of falling over the robot slams back down and resets rapidly to maintain control. It’s the little things!
The lifting arm break-off worked as intended! Though not as great as full arms it did leave enough for Phenomenon to self-right from full inversion.
With no weapon and no lifting arms, Synthesis was able to get a hit that put Phenomenon firmly on its face and it did the thing. I suspect if either of those were functional the robot would have bounced around and maybe even self-righted. Also note that when the arms moved up and snapped back down the chain broke. Naturally the half-link (never use half-links if you can) snapped leading to it being even more helpless.
Ultimately Synthesis struck the bottom and killed hopes for the rest of the fight. Before the robots were separated I did verify the wheels and weapon were still responding which was an excellent sign for future repairs but not worth the effort to continue the battle. Since Phenomenon was still left on its nose any more time was merely inviting more damage from Synthesis.
Pit Rush
With precisely 1 hour and 10 minutes until the next fight it was time to win the war in the pits. Synthesis’ hit missed most of the vital components but did strike the lifter motor. Despite Synthesis’ increased range, the weapon pulley remained intact. Part of this was fortunate geometry (chunked the aluminum but missed the belts) and the integrated frame rail pulley guard. It’s only designed to handle glancing hits or one more serious one so it did its job.
The biggest concern was prioritizing the robots for the next fight. The second robot was in the “neutral” state where it had no attachments on the front or lifting arms. This is because the other fight to worry about was Spartan 30 v. Maccabot. Due to their very different weapons it was hard to predict which configuration would be used so having a robot that was available for either was good. Unfortunately with Maccabot becoming Phenomenon’s next opponent and the components for fighting it (billet lifter tips and wedgelets) still on the damaged robot it becomes a very high stakes question of what to prioritize in the <40 minutes remaining.
This is where the game theory kicks in. With 15x 30lb robots in the field and one loss, Phenomenon would be in for a long day in the best scenario. If it defeated Maccabot it would still need one more fight to qualify for Primetime where it would then have fight a higher ranked machine. If that is the goal, then would it be wiser to have two half-dead machines or one fully-functional machine? And in the grand calculus of preparation of the NHRL World Championships, would it be wise to spend two Phenomenons before the big show? These are hard questions to ask but this is the exact kind of decision-making you have to make in the pit. With the memory of the drive and spinner still working and with only the one lifter component to replace instead of full configurations the decision was made to fix the damaged machine and run it against Maccabot.
Thanks to the high stiffness of the carbon fiber baseplate the rest of the frame was unaffected by the hit from Synthesis so the hole could be covered with tape for now. Because of Maccabot’s wide weapon it was highly unlikely any hit from there would target that one hole specifically and if it did then Phenomenon was already done for. Without ability to check the functionality due to no remaining time (foreshadowing) the robot was slapped together and brought out to fight Maccabot.
Maccabot
The pit rush was not kind to Maccabot either. With no rear drive wheel and questionable functionality it was looking worse for wear. For a bot as maneuverable as Phenomenon it would seem like easy prey to avoid the big beater bar and go for the exposed sides.
Sadly this was not so. After a brief twitch and a puff of smoke something killed the radio system on Phenomenon. While the drive and primary weapon controllers were beeping as they awaited signal it was clear the robot couldn’t fight and had to be forfeited. To say it was gutting would be an understatement.
Upon a return upstairs it seemed the lifter ESC had shorted and burned itself out. Despite efforts, its possible the conductive carbon fiber sprayed into the controller and shorted something just enough to kill it. Later a new controller was swapped in to replace it and the robot was perfectly functional.
It was very disappointing to end the day so early especially with two fully-functional 30lb robots in tow. While it perhaps could have grudged before Primetime, that was nearly 6 hours away at that point which left plenty of time to travel home.
Conclusion
Ultimately there is some frustration with the early fights for V3 but very few design changes to make. Thus far the robot has taken little real damage and showed flashes of brilliance throughout the entire fight against Overlord and most of the fight against Synthesis 30. Many of the design decisions such as the wedgelets, 4WD, and new weapon system show themselves as invaluable as they dominated robots which would have likely, and in some cases did, take out V2.
It still pales in comparison to the start Vorion had in 2023 but one could argue it has handled more intense adversity far better than Vorion had. I would even go so far as to say the ceiling for this robot is much higher given its innovations address some of the design features of other machines such as long forks. I remember talking to Jonathan Schultz of HUGE about its run at Battlebots World Championship 7 and the paraphrase went something like this: “For years Battlebots kept feeding HUGE its counter such as horizontals or hammersaws. This forced HUGE to innovate into a mutated, stronger version of itself that could handle them. Therefore when its natural prey [4WD vertical spinners] went against it they were demolished because now there were no more weaknesses to exploit.” I pray that with fights against Gargantuan, MegatRon, Overlord, and Synthesis 30 (all of whom have proven plenty powerful in their own rights) that means V3 will grow into a machine that sets the class on fire.
For now, Phenomenon will likely rest until NHRL World Championships in December. With no other summer events nor qualification to NHRL Pro Tour in the fall its unlikely it will get more chances to test its mettle in a way that doesn’t jeopardize preparations for December. Though if something does come up that makes sense then it wouldn’t be opposed to shaking off the losing streak…
Until next time! Check out the other robots and blog posts!
Bone Dead Robotics 
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