Pretty sure I am still the only member watching BattleBots (US's version of Robot Wars) but the two-hour finale is this Thursday. They're down to the final 8 and in my bracket I have 4 that I correctly picked. There's Tombstone (1 seeded horizontal bar spinner designed by an arrogant **** ), Beta (hammer bot from the UK designed just for BattleBots), Chomp (hammer bot that's where it is now because it was designed by a woman), Yeti (flimsy bot from Alaska that put all its weight into a giant spinning drum), Bronco (insanely powerful flipper that actually launches the bot into the air when it fires), Minotaur (really nasty drum spinner from Brazil I picked to win the whole thing), Bombshell (Swiss Army Bot with a really smart builder), and Poison Arrow (drum spinner with a drone, kind of like a neutered Minotaur).
Guessing we have a final four of Tombstone, Yeti, Minotaur, and Bombshell, with Minotaur winning the finals against Tombstone. I want Minotaur to win because it's both a really cool bot to watch with an amazing version of a classic design (the drum spinner) and the guys behind it are super nice. It's fighting Bronco first which is probably the most concerning bot left it could face, but Bronco's team is going to have to pick between putting their useless wheel guards on and using that wedge and going arse first like they did to Chromefly. If they don't have that wedge they have nothing that can really hold off a high kinetic energy weapon like that drum and if they leave their wheels unguarded, Minotaur's driver is definitely good enough to get around and take those wheels off like Tombstone did to it last year. Bombshell I feel is going to go with the horizontal spinner to rip pieces off of Poison Arrow's wheels like it did to Cobalt earlier, and if that works they'll definitely do that to Minotaur. But put Minotaur against Tombstone and I think it'll come down to the classic "horizontal spinner hits vertical spinner" one-hit match, and we saw how well that worked out with Son of Wyhachi and Poison Arrow.
For those of you who haven't seen it:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkbAcwYix7I[/youtube]
Tombstone will be in the finals. Its weapon is simply too destructive for anything on its side of the bracket, even Yeti's drum probably can't take the heavy bar Ray has for vertical spinners. The only bot I see being able to beat Tombstone this time around is Minotaur.
Sorry to gush about this on here but this show is one of the reasons why I'm about to get an engineering degree so I kind of have a right to be obsessed. If anybody else is watching hit me up!
