Raggabomb

Raggabomb is a green shell spinner built by the Institution of Insanity. It is deemed the first "full coverage" shell spinner in Besiege Bots. This full shell spinner was not just a very powerful weapon, but notorious for blowing up in violent fashion due to "Grabber Explosions". The explosive nature was the inspiration for the name Raggabomb.

History
Raggabomb started out as an experiment to make a "full coverage" shell spinner. So called "shell spinners" had been made before, but by technicallity these where wide overhead bar spinners. Raggabomb was the first actual shell spinner where they entire body was protected by the spinning shell. The first version was a 50 block bot, in back then, Lightweight class. This itteration was basically what back then was called a "Melty brain": A flying block driven navigator placed on top of a big spinner, but in Raggabombs case, the navigator was placed under the shell and relied on grabber mounted skid wheels. The shell was not big enough to provide room for an actual wheel-driven base.

This initial bot design was not too effective due to the explosive nature of grabbers and a hardly controlable drivetrain. However the damage potential was next level for its time. Wheter effective or not, the same bot chassis was entered with different sized shells into Antweights, Middleweights and Heavyweights. One can imagine that a driving chassis designed for a lightweight bot would not be up to par in the heavyweight class, which would also turn out to be the case. So a bigger chassis was made and put in use on the middleweight and heavyweight versions. This change only marginally improved the drive of the bot so the mixed performance remained.

The objective was clear: the melty brain chassis needed to be swapped for a chassis with wheels. Some similar shell- and overhead spinner designs started to emerge in the meta, some of which used wheels at very high camber angles, of up to 88 degrees, providing a flat chassis that could be lower then one block in height. Four different middleweight and heavyweight wheeled chassis concpets where made but all were very prone to breaking wheels on recoil.

Regardless of the bad reliabilty of the new wheels, HW Raggabomb was entered into Heavyweight Havoc. However a few days before the tournement would start, Raggabomb was swapped with the control bot Humper Bumper due to the reliabilty issues with Raggabombs wheels and the never ending grabber explosions. Humper Bumper would continue to eventually place first at Heavyweight Havoc. The Raggabomb series was kind of put on hold due to the inherent issues with the current design. The big turnaround came when Powered Cogs where starting to get used as drive wheels, they where adopted into a new Raggabomb chassis at a 85 degree negative camber. The cogs lower friction and invincible connection provided a lethal improvment in the effectiveness of the bot. This update came right around the time where the Superheavy 120 block class was introduced. As in the past, a SHW version of Raggabomb was registered into the leaderboard, this time under alias "RaggaNuke", inspired by the obscene amount of grabbers used in the shell, that, as others deemed, would almost certainly end in a "Grabber nuke" in every fight, however, the opposite turned out to be the case. Where the lower weightclass versions did not see a big improvement in effectiveness, it was a different story for RaggaNuke: Dominationg the SHW leaderboard for several weeks and utterly destroying most opponents. Eventually some losses happened in the hands of faster control bots and more powerful vertical spinners like the control bot Tamarind and spinners Atavist and Black Matter but Raggabomb had left and imprint and would become one of the most destructive spinners that Besiege Bots had ever seen.

Allot of time continued after this without any major changes in any of the Raggabomb versions. All versions except for the superheavyweight where retired due to inactivenes. Some time later, several of the weightclasses where updated and expanded and new ones where added, a new Raptorweight (40 blocks) version of Raggabomb was built, based on the original lightweight. Now, with a completely different meta, new building techniques and the introduction of the Besiege Bots Mod (in short: BBM) the new Raggabomb was much less explosive and much better all around, now featuring faster and much more controlable two stack drive and lower friction wheels, it performed allot more reliable then the older versions, albeit still ending all of its fights in a KO, wheter it be the opponent or Raggabomb itself.

A long break in appeared in the time line of Raggabomb. This ended when the Institution of Insanity started posting teasers of what seemed like a new version of RaggaNuke. Behind the scenes a new RaggaNuke was being built to potentially be entered into Superheavyweight Slaughter 2019. This RaggaNuke was lower, featured 2-stack drive, motor guard and a very stiff shell. Eventually the Institution decided to enter the overhead vertical spinner Meta Destroyer and the insanely fast, 3-stack shell spinner N.I.T.R.O. both bots did not reach the quarter finals but providing entertaining fights.

The development of the new SHW Raggabomb and N.I.T.R.O was very intertwined. The Institution of Insanity was trying out many different concepts for both bots as well as two other, unregistered shell spinners, named AngShell and Zhell. Especially in regards to shell motor and mounting designs, allot of research and experimentation was done. Raggabomb was the test bed for a torqueless, low height, Fruitloop style mount, N.I.T.R.O was the test bed for F6-style, 2 block high shell, AngShell for the experimental F6-Deadshaft Saw mount and Zhell as test bed for shell layouts (mainly teeth configurations and "bend tests"). Research on these four bots continued on and was often shaped by new advancements in the meta or BBM. At a certain point shell spinners where very dominant and very popular, with many teams making own interpretations. The dominance was mainly in scope due to the often completely invincible shell. Rules where introduced that made shell spinners use breakable teeth, limit their motors to 4 braces per motor and only allowing to spin in one direction. This decreased the polularity of shells, but with shells being the Institution of Insanity's favorite architype, they continued to design the shells. With the rise of uGrabbers there where suddenly many possibilities in shell design. The ongoing shell research eventually spawned four new shell designs: A new 3-stack torqueless RaggaNuke with a tapered Large Armor Panel shell and a deadshaft saw F6, a new N.I.T.R.O with a 3-stack direct drive F6 deadshaft mounted shell that uses Metal Blades as top, a new shell called Shell-2 that had a layout similar to N.I.T.R.O but with a different chassis and self right pole and finally a new, secret shell that is still being worked on behind the scenes.

This new RaggaNuke is currently the only remaining active Raggabomb, altough issues with shell reliabilty have prevented it from getting used on the leaderboard or in tournements. However it is preceived as one of the better looking shell spinners in the current meta.

Performance
In this chapter the performance of certain noticable versions of Raggabomb are discussed.