How nerdy are you?This week Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died. A whole generation of pasty dice-obsessed nerds owes him big time. Me included.
So, in his honour, how nerdy were you? Are you still sunlight-averse? What are the sad little things you do that nobody else understands?
As an example, a B3ta regular who shall remain nameless told us, "I spent an entire school summer holiday getting my BBC Model B computer to produce filthy stories from an extensive database of names, nouns, adjectives, stock phrases and deviant sexual practices. It revolutionised the porn magazine dirty letter writing industry for ever.
Revel in your own nerdiness.
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chthonic, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 10:32)
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I entered Robot WarsMany of my friends at university followed Robot Wars and spent ages talking about how to build a winning robot. I was one of the few who actually went on and built one. I wish I'd been able to enter the first few series, when robots were mostly wheelchair motors screwed onto wooden boxes. Unfortunately, by the time I had a house big enough and enough money to enter, it was onto series six.
By this time, most of the entrants were serious mechanical engineers with their own machine shops, and were making some very professional robots. I had a cordless drill and a hacksaw. Even so, I managed to spend about 2000 pounds over two years trying to get a machine ready to fight.
Naturally I was beaten in the first round - the qualifying rounds before the first televised rounds. To make things worse, my opponent drove straight into the pit on the first fight, so I can't even say I was beaten by anyone that good.
"Cayenne" now sits in my front room under a sheet of plywood acting as a coffee table.
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JimM, Thu 6 Mar 2008, 18:16,
2 replies)
*bows deeply*I always wanted to do that, but I couldn't have built it without mates help and none of them were interested in taking it past the "wouldn't it be cool", pub-talk stage. I figured on tortoise shape as big as allowed, as much weight as allowed, that weight supplied by armour and a roll-cage type strengthener, roller on the back instead of two wheels, really low gearing and really soft rubber for the tyres - just bulldoze every other bastard out of the way. Bugger all of this building a weapon which will fall off the first time you look at it funny lark :)
(, Fri 7 Mar 2008, 2:04, closed)
@misanthrope:You'd have done well. Everyone makes their robot as heavy as possible - you bolt on as much armour as you can within the limit (100kg). Getting low gearing is quite difficult as prebuilt gearboxes appropriate to the scale are either very expensive or very heavy. I didn't want a weapon on my robot, but the series 7 rules required that you had one - hence the flimsy arrangement on the robot on my profile pic which I expected would break off so I could get on with just ramming the opponent :)
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JimM, Sat 8 Mar 2008, 2:50,
closed)
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