User blog:Badnik96/Top 126 Series 7 Robots

Back in 2017, I went back and watched the entirety of Series 7 on a whim, and then organized the main-competition robots in a list from best to worst, while also writing my thoughts on each robot down on the side. Two years later I watched Series 7 again and this led to me re-discovering the list I made and making edits to it with new observations. Now I’m expanding the list into a full blog, to be updated periodically with new entries. I planned on doing them in increments of ten, from bottom to top, but 126 doesn’t really fit into ten all that well so the first six will be run in increments of 11.

Quick notes on the two that didn’t fight

 * Terrorhurtz: It’s a real shame that Terrorhurtz wasn’t able to be completed in time for the Seventh Wars, as it would have cleaved its way through the heat with ease (with the possible exception of Big Nipper). That doesn’t excuse the producers for not changing the seedings when Terrorhurtz turned up incomplete. I understand there was a real lack of worthy seeds to be handed out in Series 7, but surely a robot like Raging Knightmare or Disc-O-Inferno could be handed down a seed without much problem? All this does is leave a gaping hole in this heat that is incredibly egregious when the remaining robots hardly put up much of a fight against each other.


 * thUnderpants: Now this one really annoys me, now that I know the full story. You’re telling me that your robot sustained damage in the qualifier (against King B Powerworks’ token active weapon, no less, but I won’t get into that) and you decided not to repair it before the main competition??? You already claimed a spot from a stronger robot in Pressure because of your so-called entertainment factor, at least ensure your robot works so you don’t completely waste a place in the wars.

With those out of the way, let’s get started.

126: Cobra
As if anyone expected anything different here in dead-last. There’s a lot to unpack about Cobra, from its completely pitiful active weapon to the utter lack of effort in making it look like something that isn’t a depressing gray box. The pneumatic spike weapon was extinct in Robot Wars, and combat robotics the world over, by the year 2000. To show up in 2003 with such a weapon is inexcusable, not to mention the fact that it only has an estimated five strikes with it. Where in the world did all your weight go? It certainly wasn’t the titanium armor, which was so thin Kraken was able to warp it with a glancing blow. It certainly wasn’t a strong drive train, considering how slowly it lumbered into the arena. Cobra tried to qualify for the previous two wars and failed, then appeared in this one, from what I can see, almost unchanged. You’d think after the first two attempts they’d try to improve on their flawed design of a robot. It didn’t even have a wedge.

125: B.O.D.
A lot has been said about this robot’s failings already on this website, so I’ll keep this brief. An overhead spinner needs to have a strong weapon and good reach, so it can strike its opponents from a distance without being smothered by them. I cannot fathom what this team was thinking at all, entering a robot with low range, low weapon power, and very little armor. Their previous robot Night Raider actually looked okay, despite breaking down upon entering the arena. Whatever possessed them to replace it with such a hopeless design needed to be exorcised before the planning stage was even entered.

124: Brutus Maximus
Brutus Maximus gets ranked above a few others because, despite being the least durable robot placed into the arena during this entire tournament, it succeeded at what it was designed to do. No one really expected Brutus Maximus to survive its melee, and that’s exactly what happened to it, going out in a real blaze of destruction against some high-level machines. It was the designated fodder, and it played the part beautifully, surviving surprisingly long against the opposition to really get the audience going. Brutus Maximus is the ideal “made to be destroyed” robot.

123: Araknia
Another robot that can only really be classified as fodder. Araknia came in drastically underweight while also being one of the largest robots to compete in the series. The “cardboard” armor doesn’t help matters much at all. Its weapon did seem to have some force to it, however, since it at least spun with enough strength to break itself against Refbot. It also couldn’t be defeated with one flip, at least in theory. Its one saving grace is that it helped showcase the surprisingly strong newcomer Hellbent, though that would unfortunately not pan out.

122: Spin Doctor
There are a few robots I probably could have rated below this one for pure badness, but I’m putting Spin Doctor this low because of how badly it was actually constructed. Full-body spinners are tough to pull off, something I can tell you firsthand. You can’t just stuff a big motor in a circle and expect to become the next Typhoon. However, that seems to be exactly what this team did. Looking at the insides of the robot going into their melee, you can very plainly see important electronics attached to the frame with zip ties and hose clamps. Excuse me? Zip ties fail all the time even in much smaller weight classes, and you expect them to survive the forces of a properly-functioning heavyweight spinner? This outright baffles me, and watching their robot stop working after lightly tapping Panic Attack with its weapon didn’t surprise me at all. I have no idea what made the producers think this robot was worth keeping around after it failed in the exact same way a year prior.

121: Terror Turtle
I can appreciate a good comedy entry, and Terror Turtle at least tried to be that, at least I hope it did. There really isn’t a lot to talk about with the Turtle, since it hardly put up a fight and only spent about a minute in the arena in this series, but its performance in the World Championship qualifier shows us how little we were really missing of it in the main tournament. A fun robot, but not one that has any place further up on the list.

120: U.R.O.
Continuing the pattern of “bad full-body spinners”, here’s U.R.O., a robot with a sound premise let down by a lack of design experience. U.R.O. has a number of flaws, including the slow drive train, the very poor weapon design, and the lack of armor, but the worst in my opinion is just how light the disc actually was. Most spinners by Series 7’s time had about 20-25 kilograms in their weapon, essentially a quarter of the robot’s weight. U.R.O.’s spinning ring weighed 2.5 kilograms. I didn’t misplace a decimal or anything. How they expected to do anything with it remains a mystery to me. However, the team did charm me with the blinking lights and the cute team name, and I admire them for trying to improve their robot even if it had flaws to begin with. Had they entered Robot Wars a few years earlier (or had the program ran for a few more years) I think they could have been another Sir Chromalot equivalent.

119: Scarey-Go-Round
Bet you didn’t expect to see this one so high, huh? I’m rating Scarey-Go-Round here because unlike every robot ranked lower than it, it survived to a judge’s decision, despite taking heavy damage from Fluffy. Granted, most of its time in the arena was spent limping near the flame pit, but it never stopped moving. While it definitely didn’t have any real destructive potential, and looked like it climbed out of 1999, it could at least boast that it made it to the end of its battle, something no one ranked below it can.

118: Tartarus
Ranked above the previous few solely because the team behind it made the effort to make it look like something. Tartarus’ weapon was flawed from the start, though I have to admit it was a clever idea: A hydraulic claw on a moving arm like that allows them to attack more vulnerable areas of the robot, something a few other robots later on the list could have made note of. I loved the “secret agent” schtick the substitute team members came up with too. If you remember anything about Tartarus, you’ll probably remember that, since you certainly won’t remember its performance in the arena. You just can’t get away with having no srimech on a design like that.

117: Major Tom
Poor, poor Major Tom. So many wars entered, and none of them with a lick of success. Such a shame it is that its final Robot Wars appearance is such a lackluster one. Appearing in the arena as the slowest robot in the entire tournament, and boasting a weapon that it could never bring into play (I’m sure I’m not the only one that had to watch its heat multiple times to find said weapon), I’m not sure what great things were expected of this patriotic wedge bot. It never even got a chance to exhibit its pushing power in its only battle, since it was put up against two incredibly violent and experienced teams with devastating weaponry. Here’s an idea, why not put the spinning disc weapon from the second Major Tom on that chassis, instead of the doomed-to-fail clamping forks? Then you could at least be a trend-setter.

116: Shell Shock
Shell Shock is one of the first robots on this list that looks like someone with half a clue put it together, which is about the nicest thing I can say about it. Neither of its weapons seemed all that effective, though I can at least assume that its gas-powered spinner had some force at full tilt. It was severely outclassed by two very strong robots (and a third robot that had potential) in its melee, and its fate seemed inevitable from the moment it rolled into the war zone. I’ll say this for them; they did a very good job at painting their robot to look like a snail.