User:ToastUltimatum/The Tragic Roundabout

"Drive safely, lest your tyres be shredded by The Tragic Roundabout!"

- Isaac Sharp

The Tragic Roundabout was a featherweight robot which intended to enter the Featherweight Championship during Series 10, before the event was ultimately cancelled. It was entered by a Middlesbrough-based team who were new to the sport, after commissioning Team Shock to initially build the robot.

Design
"The Tragic Roundabout was my first combat robot, and I wanted to make a flail spinner as I didn't feel prepared to work with powered weaponry on my first robot, but didn't want to run down the wedge route either - the roundabout theme followed!"

- Isaac Sharp

The Tragic Roundabout is an invertible robot driven by two wheels, which were not positioned in parallel to each other, in order to make room for the robot's comparatively large drill motors. The outer HDPE rim of The Tragic Roundabout was fairly thick, providing strong side armour, where the removable link was also accessible. Two lengths of chains were attached to these rims, and outfitted with padlocks at the ends, so that the robot could function as a sit-and-spin thwackbot, although these padlocks were prone to flying off the chains upon contact with robots. A 2.2s lithium polymer battery powered the robot, and used a Spectrum transmitter. The robot's top armour was made from aluminium, and used stickers to resemble a mini roundabout sign, while the side armour resembled road chevron.

Although the robot's flails gave it high reach, The Tragic Roundabout suffered from several critical design flaws. At only 4.9kg, the robot was extremely underweight, and its top armour was relatively weak. In practice, The Tragic Roundabout was revealed to become beached on its own flails frequently while driving, and so the robot would enter its fights inverted in an effort to combat this issue, although this still would not totally prevent the robot from becoming stuck. Entering the arena inverted also meant that the robot's internals were directly attached to its 'top' armour, creating a large weakness to overhead weaponry. Its top speed was reasonable for driving around the arena, although the tip speed that it provided to the weaponry was somewhat low.

The Team
"'TaleOfTheToaster' is my YouTube channel where I make videos on the football RPG series "Inazuma Eleven" - it doesn't have much to do with Robot Wars, but I already had the logo and brand, plus people in the online Robot Wars community know me by this name, so it made sense for the team name!"

- Isaac Sharp

The TaleOfTheToaster team was captained by Middlesbrough-based Isaac Sharp, who has used the 'TaleOfTheToaster' name for his YouTube channel since late 2010, hence the team name. At the time of Series 10, Isaac Sharp was a 20-year old Marketing student, while teammate Robert Gaylor studied International Politics. Together, the team sought to stress that anyone could get involved in robotics, regardless of their engineering background, which the TaleOfTheToaster team lacked.

Isaac Sharp was the designer and driver of The Tragic Roundabout, while Robert Gaylor assisted with the maintenance of the robot. Outside of the televised competition, the team were greatly assisted by Team Shock who built the basis for the machine under commission, and by Adam Hamilton who helped the team bring their robot into fighting form.

Etymology
The Tragic Roundabout is named after the children's TV show The Magic Roundabout, the second Robot Wars competitor to take inspiration from this show, after Ruf Ruf Dougal. Isaac Sharp's desire to implement a roundabout design onto a robot stemmed from a documentary he had made as a Creative Media student in 2014, We Love Roundabouts. Having created the documentary about the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, Sharp thought that a roundabout theme would be appropriate for a sit-and-spin design when tasked with making a robot on an educational course run by John Findlay which could feature no active weapons.

Series 10
The Tragic Roundabout was among the intended participants for Series 10's Featherweight Championship, and the team brought a fully working robot to the filming of the series, even being involved with the official photoshoot. However, the Featherweight Championship was cancelled during the filming of the Heavyweight Championship, and ultimately The Tragic Roundabout would not compete in the series.

"Gutted! It would've been nice to have some advance warning that the Featherweight Championship would be cancelled, but these things happen! We still had a great time at filming, meeting the other teams and learning from them."

- Isaac Sharp

Outside Robot Wars
The first prototype of The Tragic Roundabout was built in February 2016, as part of an educational course run by John Findlay. Using Findlay's stock components, the cardboard prototype of The Tragic Roundabout fought three other cardboard machines; Mario King of Kings, Biohazard and Shovelhead. Of the three, The Tragic Roundabout defeated Shovelhead after it was thrown out of the arena by House Robot Rip, but interference issue caused The Tragic Roundabout to lose its other fights via being flipped over by Rip.

The Tragic Roundabout made its combat debut at the Robodojo Autumn Featherweight Championship, held in November 2018 near Leeds. It entered the Sportsman division of the event, and fought White Dwarf in its first battle. The Tragic Roundabout's padlocks humorously flew into the arena wall while the robot was spinning, and after being pinned against the arena wall and slammed around the arena by White Dwarf, The Tragic Roundabout lost the Judges' decision. In the losers' bracket, The Tragic Roundabout fought a fellow thwackbot, Bob II, which was armed with a saucepan. Although The Tragic Roundabout held a lead for most of the match, landing several direct hits, it ultimately became beached on its own flails and lost via KO. The Tragic Roundabout was eliminated from the competition here, but fought Red Hot Tilly Pecker to determine the final ranking of the competitors. After being overturned by the powerful axe, The Tragic Roundabout's internals came under immediate pressure from the overhead weapon, and its flails also fell below the arena wall, preventing the robot's escape. The Tragic Roundabout took significant damage from its opponent, suffering terminal damage to its speed controller, and lost the battle as it was unable to free itself from the corner of the arena.

Trivia

 * The HDPE armour that protects the side of The Tragic Roundabout was sourced from the same pipe that the alternate lifting scoop of Shockwave in Series 8 was made from.
 * Aside from his featherweight, team captain Isaac Sharp's largest contribution to the robotics community is operating the Robot Wars Wiki, having administrated the site since 2012 under the identity ToastUltimatum.