I feel like the Ant communtiy is the most popular

[TeamCrash]

The heavyweights forum is barely inactive, and nobody really talks in the other weight classes. Ants are the most popular, from what I can see.

[razerdave]

I think you mean 'barely active'.

I do agree the forums are quite quiet, the thing is a lot of discussion goes on amongst roboteers on things like Facebook. I do agree that Heavies have fallen hard as of late, the smaller weight classes will keep growing. In terms of actual numbers, Ants would take some beating (we can get 100 ants at an event when even at a UK/World champs you'd get 50), but in terms of popularity, I think FW's may have us beat.

I just hope ants continue to grow at the rate they are, innovation may slow down but there will always be something out of the ordinary for ants, much more so than the higher classes.

[Shakey]

Ants are the lowest commitment class to get into. It's cheap and quick to build so people looking tot the hobby often start with ants. Feathers aren't actually much more expensive but take longer to build and it's harder to get a 'good' robot.

I like ants as my main weight class but I must admit there's something very different about the heavier weight classes, those impacts seem tangible and it is certainly much more scary when your feather is flying.

On a side note I don't find the heavy community particularly welcoming compared to ants or feathers which I don't think is helping it.

[Hogi]

i think the antweight community is deffinitely the friendliest and it's good because at ant events everyone has time to talk so you can learn a lot of interesting stuff and make a lot of friends as i feel i have since i've been in the sport. we do also have quite a lot of diversity in antweight designs whereas in heavyweights a lot of them are flippers. i think the antweight community will continue to grow the way it is as we are still seeing lots of new things: the nanoweight and beetleweight classes for example.

[AntRoboteer]

I personally think this is the class to be in.

Friendly community, great events run by fabulous people and then there are the robots. In the antweight class, you don't have to spend several thousands of pounds to even begin to make one like in other weight classes. Nor do you need much skill at all when designing. With a heavyweight, you have to get it right first time or all of that money has been wasted. You can't exactly make a cardboard prototype of a heavy and drive it around! With the ants, I have found it very easy to be creative and make my robots innovative while also being inexpensive.

I agree that there is also a lot of diversity with weapons in the antweight class. In heavyweights, flippers are the only viable option. In the feathers, either spinners or flippers are the ones to go for. In the ants however, you don't even need a weapon for good results or you can make something complex and innovative which you wouldn't dare do in the others for fear of losing all of you money and ending up with a useless robot.

Before I built an antweight, I felt these robots were completely out of my reach but luckily there was an inexpensive way to get into the world of roboteering which is why I love the antweight class. The best class, I think.

[playzooki]

i prefer antweights because i can pretty much build them when events happen, not spend 3 months on a featherweight and realise the next event i can get to is a year away or w/e

[Hogi]

i think the best thing about antweights is that any design can be made to work, you just have to tinker and experiment until you make it work. take horrizontal spinners for example: they havn't had much success compared to other designs as they are usually quite prone to throwing themselves off the arena but then Peter built a completely new design of horrizontal spinner with the disc at the bottom rather than on top. that combined with the introduction of extra walls on arenas meant that horrizontal spinners are a lot more effective. a few other innovative designs i like are flail whale with it's extending spinner flails and my personal favorite chomp with it's lifter, grabber thing.

[Shakey]

Not trying to detract from petes spinners but the low slung disc designs are known as undercutters (Sometimes also T-bar where the blade is between the wheels) and have been around fighting robot circles for a very long time. They aren't seen as much in the higher weight classes as they have a tendency to break or bend the weapon shaft without lower support. Most horizontals in large weight classes keep the disc as low as possible in the vein of undercutters and some have had huge success (Like NST).

[peterwaller]

As Alex says low horizontal blades have have been around a long time.
Here is a version of Militant taken in 2004 and I don't think it was original then.

The recent improvement in performance in mine I think are a combination of tyres, spinner axis position and more walls.

[Hogi]

oh right. i never knew that. undercutters are cool