Robin Bennett writes:
Today didn't get off to a terribly good start, we arrived an hour late (but
at least my bike now has an MOT - due to a misreading of the MOT certificate
last November it hadn't had one for rather a long time - oops)
We almost weren't allowed in the main competition as they'd already started
the first round, but we were squeezed in at the end - against Terrorhurtz
(the successor to Killerhurtz, the best axe in RW). We had about 15 minutes
to put the top armour on and get into the ring. There was a minor delay when
we couldn't find the split pin for the top jaw but Kathy came to the rescue
with a nappy pin (the Plunderbird guys who were commentating loved this and
made sure the crowd knew about it). We weren't allowed to use our disk as
they only had a wire fence between the robots and crowd - it could easily
have thrown shrapnel into the crowd.
Our first attempt to start was cancelled because his axe wouldn't work -
Mentorn would have made him go in without a weapon to keep to the schedule
but here they just wheeled in the next set of robots.
The guy who does Miss Struts had brought along another walker, one he'd
built for Technogames - it spun a couple of weights to rock back and forth
and used a short unpowered pendulum as a second 'foot' - very cleverly moving
without actually driving the feet and in true walker style it was slow and
dull - it couldn't even do reverse let alone backwards. Scuttle was also in
the arena, running rings around Miss Struts and zooming in and out between
her Wellington-booted feet.
Then it was our go - Terrorhurtz tested his axe and made two half-inch holes
in the tarmac playground. I can't remember the details - it was a blur of
trying to avoid the axe while also trying to get a good run up for a ram. We
could push him around a bit but not enough to ram him against the wall and
even if we could it was only railway sleepers - there was no pit or house
robots to aim for either. The axe hammered down endlessly but didn't seem to
do that much damage to us (although it was wrecking the playground as we
were moving fast enough to make sure he missed more than he hit, and he hit
the ground hard on every back swing).
Eventually SMIDSY just stopped driving - John still had control of the jaws
but I couldn't move the wheels, Terrorhurtz hit us a few more times and it
was all over. :-(
As we lifted SMIDSY out of the ring we were surrounded by kids saying "Wow,
you were absolutely mullered! Kewl!" which I suppose is fame of sorts...
There was some bad feeling in the pits about the level of violence during a
'friendly' event, which surprised John and me as we thought it had been pretty
fair, they had stopped as soon as they realised we were immobilised. It was
a frighteningly good axe though, at the end of the bout he buried it two
inches into a railway sleeper (where it stuck).
Amazingly it had only penetrated our top armour in one place - on top of the
jaw motor mounting bracket. It had mangled the chassis quite badly in
places - for I while I thought we'd been immobilised because the chassis
rails were stoved in until they'd hit the sprockets! However they weren't
quite that bad, and the problem was the 4QD-radio lead - the angled end had
popped out of its socket, despite the metal clip and gaffa tape.
We plugged the plug back in, bent the chassis away from the sprockets with
borrowed mole grips and declared SMIDSY ready to fight again :-) There was a
series of games and grudge matches scheduled for later in the day but they
wanted to run the whole of the second round next and John and Vickie had to
leave so we called it a day.
We had a look for the Antweight robots that were supposed to be there but
couldn't find them - I suppose that's the downside of robots that'll fit
inside a handbag.
On the whole it wasn't very successful but we enjoyed ourselves, SMIDSY took
on one of the best weapons in the world without too much damage - if we'd
been allowed to use our disk it could have been very different. In hindsight
we should perhaps have refused to fight such an obviously dangerous robot
when the rules were so much against us - we could have hung around for the
games, done better and come home with much less damage but I'm not sure
that's really the spirit of the thing.
