EVENT REPORT 2
R aming R b ts UK
Winter T ur Final — 2008
● by John Frizell
Photo by Jessica Lale/Stuart Barnwell.
The competition that began in
Portsmouth and moved north
to Nottingham finished back on
the south coast in Maidstone in
front of capacity audiences, with
1,200 people attending two
shows. Twenty robots had made it
to the finals: 12 heavyweights and
Pain in the Asp — a
powerful six wheel
drive feather — waits
for its fight.
eight feathers, but
many more teams
came to see the
finals and take part
in the whiteboard
fights. There were
so many that they
overflowed the pit
area and extended
it into the loading
bay; late arrivals found themselves
at tables in an unheated area with
gusts of arctic air blowing in
through the loading doors.
The random draw pitted
Terrorhurtz — the most powerful
of axe robots — against Thor,
another axe. The one design
weakness of Terrorhurtz is that it
is open at the top. As its builder
commented, “Axes are rare.
We'll be fine unless we meet
another axe.”
After a little maneuvering,
the two machines squared up to
each other and started pounding.
Terrorhurtz was the more powerful and began to buckle Thor's
armor, but Thor stood firm,
despite the battering it was
taking, and managed to get its
axe into the open top of
Terrorhurtz to the cheers of the
crowd and applause from the
roboteers in the pits. But
Terrorhurtz kept going. Well into
the fight, Thor lost power and
Terrorhurtz stopped battering it
and pushed it into the pit. The
massive axe blows had bucked
the armor enough to snap a
battery wire, cutting power.
Terrorhurtz was through to
the semi-finals where they faced
Hydra — the only other axe
machine in the competition.
Hydra had blown their pneumatic
system in an earlier fight,
however, leaving them without a
weapon so they were easily
dispatched.
The featherweight final was
an eight-way melee with the
action swirling all around the
arena. A couple of machines
went out quickly but most bat-
Photo by Elizabeth van Son.
The crowd waits while Megamouse is
made safe so the arena can be cleared for
the next fight.
28 SERVO 02.2009