How Gabriel managed to scrape their way to the heat final and take it to a judges' decision is beyond me!
This was by far the weakest heat, both in terms of robot quality and battle quality. Thermidor 2 is probably the most inconsistent robot in the history of Robot Wars. Semi-finalists in Series 4 and 7, first robot to throw two robots out of the arena in one fight, winner of the farcical flipper frenzy, runner-up in the Extreme Series 2 annihilator, and then going out in the first round of Series 5 and 6. Six of their nine losses to date were due to the robot breaking down. It was either gonna walk the heat or go out the first 10 seconds.
Chompalot were lucky to go through, but it's a hopelessly bad design that was never going to last.
Infernal Contraption had the same problems as 15 years ago; ineffective weapon and impossible to control.
Crazy Coupe 88 had two spinners, which logical meant were at half the power they could have been, and had aluminium step plate armour. Not good.
Beast had a pretty half-arsed flipper and was probably the most unreliable robot we've had. Armour is important!
Ironside 3 is not a bad design, but the bar is quite slow compared to a lot of others (i.e. Carbide and Pulsar) and only looked good because they were up against some pretty weak opposition, the self-righting arm was too slow as well.
Gabriel is basically a very unrefined version of Stinger. Axlebots always work well against flippers because their is virtually no body to flip, but because they're all wheels it makes them very vulnerable to spinners. The weapon actually can beat the crap out of other robots, but it's difficult to aim and control. I think they have the least chance of being chosen as a wild card.
I was expecting a lot more from Pulsar. Even when it was working fully the weapon wasn't nearly as destructive as I was expecting. After their elimination I reasoned that they would weazel their way back in due to some of the split-second footage in the trailers and at the beginning of each show. If they can't sort out their reliability they'll be going out in the elimination round.
I had previously posted about seeing snippets of fights in the trailers and at the beginning of each show between robots not in the same heat. Of the three that I saw, one is between two robots that have already qualified for the final, therefore resolved, one is between Carbide and one of the wild cards, but the other is between Eruption and Infernal Contraption...who have both already been eliminated and are not wild cards. How does that work?
