Big Red
This 60lb spinning mass delivers huge hits! It spins at 180mph tip speed and was designed by our very own weapons specialist, David Rush! This was the weapon that started it all. The David’s loved the smaller version of this weapon, on 3lb Animus, and 1lb robot Odium. They knew they needed to take it to the big time, and thus, Malice was born. It is 22″ from the tip of the 4140 hardened steel tooth, to the back end, where you’ll find 3 brass inserts held in only by force. We use a hydraulic press to insert the brass balancing metal and it doesn’t come out!
This weapon is 3″ tall, and we lovingly refer to it as a drumette, as no one else has a horizontal disk as thick as this one!
Our newest weapon! The Color was voted on by our Instagram, and it is 55lb beast! With four sharp ar-500 teeth, this weapon digs in and cuts instead of smacks and tosses.
Drumstick
This will be the weapon you see most on Malice during fights. The aluminum hub is surrounded by 4 ar-500 teeth that will make deep gouges in even the most battlehardened competition. These nasty teeth are inset into the aluminum hub for maximum strength, and this is also our shortest weapon coming in at only 2″ tall. This weapon was made with some very valuable input from the king himself, Ray Billings of Tombstone.
Rolling Blackout
This heavy-hitting dual tooth monster is made up of an aluminum hub, ar-500 teeth bracing and either hardened 4140 teeth or S7 steel teeth. This looks very similar to our Drumstick weapon, but the single tooth is a great impactor that tosses the opponent rather than digging into their armor. We would use this weapon when we need weight to add forks, but want to toss our opponent still!
Purple Pain
This Weapon was created to save as much weight as possible for when we have to fight large overhead strikes where we need extra weight to add a belt protector, or extra top armor, against robots like Shatter or Sawblaze. Weighting in at only 45lbs, this weapon had an unexpected upside, were we were able to grab Shatter’s weapon and rip it off due to the large holes leaving lots of room. Two plates of AR-500 steel compress aluminum spacers and give us a tip speed of 190 mph. 22″ of pure speed! We love this weapon! Since it was retired, it was sold to the amazing Jacob Fultz!
The “Bunny Tail”
In 2020, Malice was a brand new type of spinner. A short, low-reach, but powerful horizontal spinner was unheard of. One of the things we learned was that the gyroscopic force of the weapon was enough to keep us balanced on our backend. This caused two devastating losses. After the first one to MadCatter, we installed a long bolt on the back, and it turned out to not be long enough, causing a loss to SubZero.
At that time, we knew we had to have something beefier than a bolt, and thus the “Bunny Tail” was born. Made out of 3D-printed TPU, the bunny tail keeps us on our wheels!
Robotic Death Company Weapon Speed Controller
During the 2021 Season our Vex BB motor controller burnt up 3 times and we had to find an alternative!
Malice runs a ME0909 Motor to power our Weapon, this is a massive motor that runs on 12S and 600amp+ peak. There are very limited motor controller options to get something that massive moving a weapon as heavy as ours. There are the old reliable contactors, the Trampa VESC and the Vex BB ESC.
Contactors are great for the old batteries that didn’t have the capacity to dump all their amperage all at once. Since we run lipos, if we used a contactor, we would have our batteries dump their amps and catch on fire (see Tombstones fight against Shrederator for what happens when you use Lipos with Contactors)
The trampa vesc is a great ESC for brushless motors, but when it’s used in brushed mode (what we need for the ME0909) use a very reduced current, and the spin-up time is ATROCIOUS.
The Vex BB seemed like our best option because it had been shown reliable by robots like Bite Force.
Luckily, the amazing folks over at Robotic Death Company have now solved our speed controller problem! We have tested it out and it’s proven to work!!!
Castle Drive Speed Controllers
For our drive, Malice uses castle speed controllers in brushed mode! We use brushed drive motors because for the way we drive, brushed gives us the best control!
Malice’s Forks are a new addition in 2022, and have only seen one battle. However, they were immensely successful!
The forks are made of two materials, either Titanium or AR-500. We will use them whenever we fight someone who may have a wedge.
Malice’s Forks are a new addition in 2022, and have only seen one battle. However, they were immensely successful!
The forks are made of two materials, either Titanium or AR-500. We will use them whenever we fight someone who may have a wedge.
Malice’s Frame is composed of AR-500 and Aluminum. The siding is all aluminum, and there are two AR-500 weapon mounts compressing the UHMW and Titanium top and bottom plates onto the Aluminum siding.
All the pieces of malice puzzle together loosely. Bolts go through all the parts and keep the pieces from falling apart. Malice is what we call a “clamshell” frame. A clamshell frame means that instead of being bolted to a pre-assembled bone structure, the frame is made by stacking premade pieces that fit together and then having large outer armor pressing down on the assembly pieces to create a sturdy shell.
This is different from other robots like jackpot and Skorpios, who used a traditional “skeleton” framing method, where the sides of the robot are welded to the bottom, and they bolt armor onto the rigid framing. Bots like shatter and duck use a billet frame method, where the frame is machined down from a single block of metal into the shape they need to hold their internals!
There are many benefits to all methods. By far the more common method is the skeleton method, mostly due to the cost. It’s relatively inexpensive to create and manufacture. The downside is it’s very difficult to make it perfectly, and you have to add a lot of tolerance for how it can become tweaked. The most expensive method is billet, mostly due to how much material is wasted during the creation of the frame. This is usually perfectly made to fit the robots and is very precise and repeatable. The downside is, when the billet frame gets damaged, it usually is not repairable.
We choose to do a clamshell because it’s much easier to work on. Swapping out a piece instead of a whole frame, no tight corners, no busted knuckles! My favorite part of Malice is how open and easy it is to work on, everything makes sense!
MotoEnergy 0909
Whyachi Gearboxes on Magmotors!
One of the strongest features of Malice is our Vulcanized Rubber Tires from The Black Dragon team. I think they’re the reason Malice has had as much success as it has.
Malice has exposed wheels, but our tires are a form of armor that has held up to the tests. They absorb huge amounts of force from the hits and keep on running. We haven’t lost a single tire, even after our fight with gigabyte when one of our tires had been a bit ripped, we used shoe goo to repair it, and still run it today.
There are many forms of tires, polymer cast tires, go-kart tires, Meccanum tires, wheelbarrow tires, Colson tire, and more we can’t list, but the grip provided by the Black Dragon’s vulcanized rubber tires is (again, in my very limited opinion) unparalleled. The specialty paint used by Battlebots to coat the Battlebox is immensely slippery. You can see a lot of teams go out and lose a ton of their velocity just gripping the floor, whereas Malice’s drive is one of the most reliable for grip!
Why don’t more teams use Black Dragon’s tires if they’re so amazing? Cost. Our size tire cost this year was a lot per tire, granted, we use a large diameter 12” tire, and most teams can get that cost less due to their smaller 5-6” tire, but it’s still in the hundreds per tire price. In addition, the black dragon teams can only produce a small number of tires for the competition every year.
For our team, the cost is worth the investment. The grip on the Box floor, combined with the shock dampening rubber makes them the perfect choice for our exposed tire.