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Junkyard Wars: The Next Generation
A reader writes: "The makers of Junkyard Wars are starting up a new series called Ultimate Machine Combat. 30 teams and 30 days each to build "ultimate fighting vehicle" to battle in a "secret arena". This is attracting gear heads of all genres, including my local Jeep Club."
I'm all for junkyeard wars and all, but i don't think they should let people spend more on the machine that what they are allocated. This just means that someone will probably go and get some rich sponsor to give them a wack load of money, then hire some nasa engineers to design and build the machine.
On the other hand, I can't wait to see the competition, should be really intresting.
And if so, there have to be some pretty strict regulations. Is this going to be a demolition derby or a large-scale battlebots war with pneumatic spikes and huge sawblades ripping cars apart? Obviously any humans in the ring would be in serious danger. So I have to imagine these things are unmanned.
This is probably then 1 of 3 possibilities:
- Manned cars, but the safety regulations will turn this into a glorified demolition derby... *yawn*
- Unmanned cars, so a huge-scale battlebots thing.... pretty cool, and very expensive... cool to watch I'm sure. But I doubt this is the format.
- Unmanned, small remote control cars.... so, Battlebots. But why would they re-do Battlebots???
My thoughts are, that this will be a really cool, dangerous show, or a boring Battlebots ripoff... hard to tell from the website.Mark
Yeah, Carmen is cool to look at, but she doesn't hold a candle to the beautiful, brainy, and British Cathy Rogers.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I'm sick of seeing two small wedges on wheels roll around like they were being driven by drunk mice, with matches only lasting 60 seconds, usually ended by some kind of mysterious mechanical failure. I'm sick of seeing "house robots" and "obstacle courses".
I want to see two robots fight one another, nothing else.
I want to see a plain empty gravel pit, with no crowds. I want to see two robots go in, and only one come out. I want to see four class systems. Weight classes, cost classes, power classes, and armaments classes.
Power Classes:
- Batteries
- Unlimited
Armaments Classes:
- Mechanical weapons only
- liquid/flamable-fuel/sub-cm-projectile based weapons allowed*
- Unlimited class, large caliber projectiles, explosives and shaped charges, and EMP weapons allowed.
The weight and costs classes will have to be set depending on just how many people are willing to compete in them, and considering that now most people have to face the real possibility of having their bot totalled in-game.
May the best team win.
And this time, the losers really do go to the scrapheap!
(*) go-go-gadget sand-blaster!