Servo - February 2009

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.