Drive tutorial

These are several tips that you should follow when setting up a bot's drive system.

Drive Motors

Obviously those are spin motors.

The best drive motors are HP Z-teks, although you may want to use right angle drive for a lightweight that doesn't need much speed (as a spinner or eventually hammer), or antweights and beetleweights (although a beetle rammer. could be faster)

Dual HP Z-tek drive is great for lightweight Rammers, decent for middleweight rammers or Popups, and is the common drive for heavyweights not needing a fast drive. Of course you can use Z-teks too, but not on heavyweights.

Don't use redbirds.

You should also know that bursting your drive motors with servos/snappers makes your bot faster. Useful in most departments, but more unstable than non-bursted drive.

Wheels

The best wheels are Shiny Hubs because of their low weight and decent diameter, but if you have an invertibility problem with them you could use Slipperbottoms. Avoid other wheels, there are heavier and are big targets for your opponent. Using miniwheels is not worthy even if they are difficult targets, because they're heavy too.

If you want extremely low ground clearance, put a rubber wheel on a Z-tek. Useful in most cases.

Exotic Drive Systems (generally not allowed in tournaments)

The most common are discs/tribars with weapons on them used as wheels. Although they are stronger than usual wheels and make effective damage, they have extremely low grip (get ready to be pushed) and are a slow drive system, besides being frowned upon by most of the community. A bot with that drive is called a crawler. Tribar crawlers are generally not used because weaker than disc crawlers and harder to move.

There are also walkers, reproducting a bot with legs, made with servos, burst motors or tribar (tribar crawler).