88 Balls of Steel: Requiem
We won Best Theme, which I figured we would when the woman who came up with the theme came up to me no less than three times raving about how great our stuff was. We had by far the highest "score" of any of the award winners...we won with an average score of 9.84! The next highest winning average was in the low 6s. Boo yah.
Unfortunately, our 4th teammate wasn't able to be there. He joined the team and worked for a week and a half before realizing his high school reunion was the same weekend.
Anyway, it let me say in my spiel that he was stuck back in 1895 due to a mishap during a test run.
Since he couldn't be there, and he was out of town all weekend, we engaged in a little sneakery and dropped off his award...with a little bonus for him to find when he returned home. (We snuck into his back yard, dropped off the machine and his ribbon, and ran like hell.
)
Actually, our spiel was probably what helped us win the award. You may have noticed in the edited video that our machine only takes 30-40 seconds to go, when it's supposed to last 1-3 minutes. To make up for that, we came up with this schtick about how we had tried to solve time travel with Einstein's theory of relativity, but found out it was too old school and no longer worked. Then we tried String Theory (since we're pulling strings...duh!), but that turned out to be bunk. Finally after Googling deep, we ran across Doc Brown's Time Compression Theory, and that's what allowed us to perfect our machine, along with all our nuclear reactions. We had to have a handout that explained things...here's the text of ours.
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88 Balls of Steel
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads…”
We just needed v-shaped aluminum tracking, an RC Delorian, and 88 balls of steel.
Our first instinct upon hearing the theme of the challenge was to use the movie series as our focal point. It wasn’t until later that we decided to use metal spheres as our primary moving elements. In the movies, the Delorian that houses the Flux Capacitor (time machine) has to reach 88 miles per hour in order to travel through time. Combining the two was a natural progression, and a name was born. Of course, then we had to deal with the problem of using 88 metal balls in our machine.
Key Concepts
Back to the Future: We have several elements representing the theme of the challenge: The Delorean (with Flux Capacitor), the clock tower with electrical line, and the "reverse" motion of our machine.
One Ball into Many: We decided that any Back to the Future themed machine better figure out how to make a Delorian travel through time! But, we didn’t have a real Flux Capacitor, so we had to figure out another way to time travel…that’s when we discovered it-atomic energy! By splitting metal balls several times and finally rejoining them, we’d have the energy we needed! Every smaller set of balls is hidden as the next set is released, giving the illusion that we're still using the mass of the single ball to power the machine. At the end, a huge spill of SEVENTY balls transforms back into a single large ball, which triggers the electrical storm that powers the time-traveling Delorean!
Time Compression: Following Doc Brown's time compression theory , we discovered that we could compress two minutes into thirty seconds while building the energy we needed to send the car back to the future. That's why it appears to take so little time, but check your watch! We assure you, two real minutes have elapsed.
Our Greatest Challenge
Space and Time: We wasted our first week trying to solve the Grand Unified Theory, but we scrapped that. Then we moved to String Theory, thinking it would solve the problem of the next link...but String Theory's bunk. But then we ran across Doc Brown's time compression theory and our problems were solved! By filling the spatial field with several nuclear reactions, we were able to generate 1.21 Gigawatts of energy needed to power the Flux Capacitor within the space of our contraption. An unfortunate side effect of Doc Brown's Theory caused our two-minute presentation to appear as if it only takes 30 seconds!
Team Members: M.Y. (time lord), Wil Upchurch (torqued), J.B. (druid), and C.W. (Sir Not Appearing at This Challenge)
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And last but not least, here's a video of our link at the event. This is the last run, so you can see the car actually shoot off the table, leaving its hook dangling from the wire, which DID successfully pull the next string on both runs of the chain!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXfFpLdgz2E
(My apologies for the video being so small...if anyone has any YouTube experience I'd love some pointers. I've created this video twice at 640x480 in Camtasia, but it shrinks it ridiculously when I upload it to YouTube.)
Thanks for reading.
