About That Giant Robot Battle Last Night

Two years ago we wrote about a giant robot battle between the USA and Japan. After two years in the making, MegaBots (team USA) and Suidobashi (team Japan) were finally ready for the first giant robot fight. If you are into battle bots, you probably did not miss the fight that happened around 7:00 pm PST. If you missed it, you can watch the whole thing here.

There were two duels. First it was Iron Glory (MkII) vs. Kuratas, and after that it was Eagle Prime (MkIII) vs. Kuratas.

Be warned, spoilers ahead.

Or not that much. The first combat ended in 30 seconds or so, with the heavier Kuratas knocking Iron Glory to the ground in one punch. That was all it took, and it was a bit disappointing. The second combat had a bit more action, the robots actually got stuck in each other and, as per rules, had to be restarted. A kind of “go to the corners” as in boxing. There were some interesting surprises like Kuratas launching a drone, and Eagle Prime showing off a 4 foot, 40 hp chainsaw. In the end, Eagle Prime’s superior weight and weaponry grabbed the victory.

The heavily edited video of the fight left some viewers slightly disappointed. But if you think about it, there were actual humans inside the robots, and that alone had to limit a lot on the potential action. For example, they fired giant paint balls at each other instead of explosive rockets. Even in smaller battle bots there are limitations about weapons, and that makes sense. If you are building a giant, metallic, ground vessel to win a fight with no weapons limitations, well, it’s already built, and it is called a tank. So we’ll take paint balls and theatricality.

All in all, the robots were huge feats of engineering and are awesome to see in action. This was only the first giant robot battle, lets hope there are more to come. Here is a short version of the event with the battles included:

Filed under: news, robots hacks

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