Two robots, four metres and two tonnes each, fight with blades on a closed street. Every move was written before the horn: eight commands, locked, with nothing left to press once the barriers drop. The machine carries out exactly what you wrote.
Your team gets a terminal and eight slots. Advance, retreat, strike, lunge, parry, hold, in whatever order you think beats the team in the other pit. The list loops until someone reaches three touches. When the referee locks the terminal it uploads, and that's your bout.
The robot walks itself out to its mark. The block gets cleared, the barriers drop, the horn goes. From then on the only radio on the street is the referee's stop button. Your team stands behind the barrier with everyone else.
One command every two seconds, called by a clock on the street. Three metres of composite blade over a pressure strip; a clean hit on the torso plate scores and nothing else does. First to three. Run the same two programs again and you get the same bout, move for move, because nothing here is guessing.
Every robot answers to the same six commands. What changes is mass, reach, and how hard a blade has to land before the plate calls it a touch. Pick the wrong one and a good program still loses.
4.2 m · 1.8 t · balanced
What the rulebook assumes when it says "the robot". Standard reach, standard mass, no quirk to plan around. Rookie teams get a season on one whether they asked for it or not.
3.9 m · 1.1 t · light, long blade
The lunge covers two marks instead of one, which wins bouts and loses them. Get it parried and Ronin staggers for two ticks with nothing you can do about it. Thin plate, so a lighter blow still scores against you.
4.6 m · 2.6 t · heavy, shield arm
The parry holds through the next tick as well, so a well-placed block buys two. It only advances every other tick, and two and a half tonnes doesn't hurry. Glancing blows die on the plate.
A real street, shut for the night. Ten marks down the centre line, five metres apart, and the robots move mark to mark and nowhere else. Retreat off the end of the lane and you back into whatever is parked there. That damage is real, it gets repaired between bout nights, and it comes out of the team's budget.
Two hand-built robots at half scale, one car park, forty-two rule revisions.
Six four-metre robots on a closed street. Ronin got its long lunge here. So did the ballistic barrier.
Robot fleet in final assembly, block clock in certification, street permits signed.
Twelve bout nights. The waitlist is the order we call people in, so joining early means hearing early. Nothing is charged today.
$45 planned
$290 planned
$1,200 planned
$180 planned
Write your eight commands wherever you are and send them in. They go onto a league chassis, and that chassis fights on the street on a scheduled night: same blades, same three touches, same repair bill if it goes badly. You watch it happen on the stream. What you can't do is reach it mid-bout, and neither can anyone standing in the pit. We send you the command sheet when your bout is scheduled.
Nobody. Once the terminal locks, the robot has its list and nothing else. A clock on the street calls the ticks and the robot reads its own program off the top. The referee holds a stop button, and that's the only radio pointed at the block.
At the pit terminal, before the bout. A program is a list of up to eight commands from a fixed set. Teams can work it out on paper or at the terminal itself. When the referee locks the terminal, it uploads and the robot walks out.
Distance, and the fact that nothing is random. A strike only reaches the next mark along, so footwork decides whether your attack does anything at all. Feed the same two programs in twice and the bout comes out identical both times. When you lose, it's because you read the other team wrong, not because the dice went against you.
Four metres of it, swinging three-metre blades on a public street. What keeps it a sport rather than a demolition is the scoring: pressure sensors in the blade edge and the torso plate decide touches, and how much gets wrecked along the way counts for nothing.
A twelve-metre exclusion zone, a four-metre ballistic barrier in front of the stands, blade speed governed in firmware, and a referee with a hard stop on every robot. The robots can't leave the centre line.
It gets carried off and the shop rebuilds it. Bent limbs, cracked plate and a sheared actuator are a week of work and a line in the budget, which is the main reason teams stop writing programs that trade hits. Nothing here comes back fresh for the next bout.
Send a program in and the league runs it on a league chassis on a scheduled night. The bout is on the street either way; you watch it on the stream instead of from the stands. Your program is locked before the horn like everyone else's.
Not in season one. Everyone programs league chassis so the contest is about the program rather than the budget. A builder division is on the list for season two.