Hiding Components within Components

One controversy in Roboforge is the ability to place your opponents so that they overlap, effectively creating two or more components that occupy the same space. Although this has been debated in depth Roboforge has stepped forward multiple times now to publicly and officially declare that this is NOT a bug but a design feature available to everyone.

But why is this an effective tactic? For one you can use this method to hide critical components within a chassis. Another advantage is that you can hide weak support components within stronger components such as weapons or Armor.

Component Cluster
COMMON COMPONENT CLUSTER
Here is an example, to the left, of a cluster of critical components : A controller, 2 energy units, a sensor, and a standard plate to hold them all together. These are components critical to the operation of your bot and require as much protection as you can provide. You CAN of course simply protect them with armor or weapons, however once your protection is destroyed then your sensitive components are open to attack. Another shortcoming of protecting your vital components is that it may involve a design challenge in and of itself to properly cover all areas.

The benefits of hiding your criticals within the chassis is that the chassis will always protect them and it is usually much easier to armor a chassis then a group of component nodules. Yes, your chassis will take damage, but your hidden components will most often never take a hit. I say most often because there is an achilles heel to this setup, and that is the piece you use to attach the whole assembly to the chassis. In this case it is the standard plate. But again, it is much easier and more efficient to protect that one point then to protect each sensitive component.

Attach and Rotate to Hide
ATTACH AND ROTATE TO HIDE
Using an Ultair Chassis as an example (image to Left), I've attached the corner of the Standard Plate to the middle uppermost connection point. This places the plate with the components down so that when I rotate the plate into the desired position the sensitive components will be nearly completely hidden. This also places the Standard Plate on the backside of my Chassis further aiding in protection.

In some cases it is necessary to actually put your connection component on your chassis and attach all components to the connection piece, THEN drag and drop the connection component into the Limb Bin. This will give you the advantage of having an open work area to position your pieces and further allows you to place the entire cluster in various areas of your chassis to find the best place for hiding your components.

Once you have the pieces attached and rotated into position then you find that very little, if any, of your sensitive components are open to attack.

Components Hidden
FINAL HIDDEN COMPONENTS
The final image shows you the hidden components now protected by the chassis. You can see that the energy components do protrude out the sides. Further experimentation and tweaking of this method would also hide these as well. Perhaps by using a second plate on the first you could actually place the energy components within the controller which resides within the chassis.

The attaching Standard Plate can be easily protected with minimal Shielding and not only are all but one of your Chassis connection points still available, but the Standard plate also provides even more overlapping connection points to allow other possible part within part hiding.

Keep in mind that using this method does not restrict you to only sensitive components and chassis. Clever usage of 2 Standard 45 degree blocks will create a square block with two overlapping connection points. This is a very nice way of creating weapons that overlap, or extensions within weapons, etc. My bot Whomp uses this method to create a solid arm of Ram Weapons. In some cases overlapped weapons will yield a double strike on damage because you have two weapons hitting the spot at the same time, but even when that doesn't occur you still have a backup weapon if one breaks.