User blog:Toon Ganondorf/Series 5 and the epidemic of drawing robots against veterans

A frequent cry of agony in Ragnabot is “why did these two have to meet here?” I certainly felt it when my beloved Bulldog Breed drew Terrorhurtz in an otherwise completely bloodless heat. But that’s the nature of Ragnabot. Randomness controls everything.

In Robot Wars, there’s no excuse for drawing together competent robots in Round 1 of a Heat stacked with weaklings.

Once I wrote out my original list, I realised that it was heavily skewed to Series 5, and that I was struggling to comment on more than 4 with any degree of detail. Series 5 was the strongest because by then we’d established who the heavyweights were – Chaos 2, Hypno-Disc, Firestorm, etc – and not wasted legitimate competitors against them. A lot of these robots were around in Series 4, but with three-way melees this risk was reduced. Returning for one last Series of 1v1 melees, Series 5 highlighted the dos and don’ts of drawing robots against the obvious heat winners.

I’ve written this list more in the style of Crash’s lists, where I discuss every entry and whether it fit, as opposed to picking out the rankings. But first, because I’ve already written them, here’s the non-series 5 entries I was going to mention when this was a ranking list.

The ultimate questions is - Do we as viewers lose by having these robots seemingly guaranteed a loss in Round 1?


 * Supernova – Series 7 – Supernova and Storm 2 would have to have been the two most daunting robots in the Heat of Death, with Shredder and Steel Evolution definitely a couple of rungs lower in threat capability. Why put them in the same battle when you can swap Shredder for it. It’s clear that the four “S” robots were meant to proceed to Round 2, but all this did was increase the chance that Storm 2 would take out Supernova in Round 1 and leave us with the vanilla Trax in Round 2. Supernova would smash up either Trax or Steel Avenger to reach Round 2, and by defeating Shredder/Rhino, guaranteed us a Heat Final that The Third World Championship proved would have been a doozy. But then we’d miss the high speed OotA….
 * Crusher – Series 3 – Crusher had its problems, but there’s no denying its weapon worked. Why then, in a Heat full of weaklings, did they throw it against the reigning bronze medallist and former UK Champion Beast of Bodmin? How much fun would it have been to watch it crumple The Witch, or even Vercingetorix wouldn’t have been that much trouble.
 * DisConstructor - Series 8 – One battle was top-heavy (a former semi-finalist and two eventual finalists) and the other was weak (Foxic, M.R. Speed Squared, Draven and Chimera). Poor old DisConstructor was stuck in the battle that guaranteed that there would be blood, and the other guaranteeing at least one naff robot would proceed (Draven being the best case scenario).
 * Absolut Krankhaft – German Robot Wars – This is a simple one. All three of these robots (Black Hole, Tsunami and Absolut Krankhaft) moved. In the battle in the previous episode, Son of Armageddon might as well have been running an obstacle course.
 * Mechaniac – The Third World Championship - What was the logic for putting the Austrian Mechaniac against the Sri Lankan Supernova in the qualifiers? The countries don’t have a logical rivalry. They aren’t even on the same continent. Brutal as it was to lose Gravity in the qualifier, at least an all-Dutch qualifier made sense. Meanwhile, we get stuck with the winner of Hard and Riptillion. Surely putting Supernova against Riptillion and Hard against Mechaniac makes more sense – there’s a semblance of geographical relevance there in that case. Assuming that Mechaniac can see off Hard, that then puts it against Supernova later, but at least a competent looking flipper that came all the way from Austria gets to win a televised fight.