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Rollercoasters and Robot Wars

Serena

Serena

Miss CoasterForce 2016
Staff member
Social Media Team
Like any self respecting goon, I've been passing the time this Lockdown by rewatching every series of Robot Wars. The British one with Craig Charles, of course. And it has struck me just how many robots share their names with rollercoasters. Here, have a Venn Diagram:

robotwarsdiagram.jpg

There's so many! Interestingly, the robots that share their names with world class creds (Nemesis, Maverick, Griffon) are some of the worst robots. Whereas Corkscrew has been praised as one of the most destructive Robots to ever grace the tournament, lol!

While the Venn Diagram shows a clear shared lexicon between the world of rollercoasters and the world of Robot Wars, I can't help but wonder if the link goes deeper. Are some of these robot builders...goons? I mean, surely it's no coincidence that we have an Oblivion and a Nemesis robot during a show filmed in Britain in the 90's, at a time when those B+M beauties were big news. (NB: This theory does not hold up in regard to creds such as Dynamite - which opened in 2019 haha!)

It's impossible to know if the robot makers were naming their beastly little machines after creds, but a little part of me likes to believe they were. So, instead let me set the scene and throw the question to the goons on here...

It's 1998. You have donned some camo trousers and you're in The Pit with Phillipa Forrester. She turns to you with that big ol 90's microphone and asks..."what cred have you named your robot after?"

I'd probably keep mine nice and simple and obvious. A robot that's known for being rough. A robot themed to horror. A robot with a circular saw for chopping up it's victims. And it'd be called...The Ultimate.


Jk. It's Saw. Obviously.
 
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What a show! So sad they cancelled the new series but the 90s/00s ones were ultimately the best. That is an extensive list! There must have been a Goliath at some point! If not, a missed opportunity!

So many cheesy 90s/00s options. I quite like X:\ No Way Out.
 
ha, love this thread!!

Before answering the question, I'm going to come in with a bit of a brag. The dad of a friend of mine from primary school had a robot on Robot Wars - Dantomkia. Nice simple robot with a flipper. Famously was the first (and maybe only?) robot to flip the legendary Chaos 2 out of the arena. Was able to 'drive' it a couple of times during random local exhibitions of the robot. Good, simple times.

Sadly Dantomkia wasn't named after a cred, but instead my friend and his siblings.


Anyway, bragging over. I've decided to name my 1998 cred-bot after my highest ranked cred that would have been open in 1998 (and whose name isn't in the above diagram). That means it is...*checks spreadsheet*...Lisebergbanan? Nah, that's actually rubbish...*Checks spreadsheet again*...Psyke Underground. Well in 1998 that was still called Sirocco, so yeah, let's go with Sirocco.

Since a sirocco is also the name of a Mediterranean wind, I'd be sure to make sure my cred-bot had some sort of spinning blade weapon too. That'd be cool.
 
I used to love Robot Wars, it's a shame the BBC revival was canceled, but robot combat is still going strong in the USA with a new series of BattleBots currently about 7 episodes in. Some british teams compete there too, for example, heres a clip of warhead, a bot from the same team that built Razer, which was probably my favourite back in the day. If you want to see how destructive some of these bots have become though then do a search for Tombstone.


As for my cred-bot? here's DODONPA, a powerful pneumatic flipper where DODON is written on the top and PA! on the underside of the flipper.
 
Excellent topic, it doesn't surprise me that there would be a big overlap between roller coaster and Robot Wars lovers! I absolutely loved the original series, and really enjoyed the 3 more recent series too despite some contentious Judges' decisions in the finals!

RMC are a bit of a gold mine for robot names - Steel Vengeance, Iron Rattler and Wildfire all work but I'd say my favourite would be Untamed - the robot would have to have some kind of wild animal theme with a claw weapon.

Looking at it the other way around, I always thought Chaos would be a good coaster name (I don't really remember the robot but it must have existed prior to it's very famour sucessor!), in fact that was the name I gave to my Year 11 Design Project roller coaster - perhaps I was inspired by Robot Wars without even knowing it!
 
These days I'd probably go for something like Arashi and build it as Storm 2s Japanese themed cousin.


Weapons are cool and all I think I was most impressed when the push bot got so powerful it could shove something out of the arena - can only imagine how much stronger a concept like that could be 18 years later.

JoshC. said:
Before answering the question, I'm going to come in with a bit of a brag. The dad of a friend of mine from primary school had a robot on Robot Wars - Dantomkia. Nice simple robot with a flipper. Famously was the first (and maybe only?) robot to flip the legendary Chaos 2 out of the arena. Was able to 'drive' it a couple of times during random local exhibitions of the robot. Good, simple times.
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Most impressive thing I've heard so far this year - you know Dantomkia, the people!

My biggest robot wars claim to fame is meeting Aggrobot at a fair in Dorking, but it was just on a table cutting bits of metal (and never much good on the show).

daviddoc said:
I used to love Robot Wars, it's a shame the BBC revival was canceled, but robot combat is still going strong in the USA with a new series of BattleBots currently about 7 episodes in.
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Cheers for the heads up. I've been waiting for more televised Battlebots to return ever since it was shown around the same time as revival Robot Wars and I found it far more entertaining. If anyone needs proof of that, here's a robot doing something amazing with a rake.

 
Now if only somebody managed to enter Robot Wars with robots named "Roller Coaster", "Wild Mouse", and "Big Apple", I wonder if a majority of coasters would fall within the shared zone of the Venn diagram.
 
You had me at "in the pit with Phillipa Forrester".
Mmmm. 🤤

Great topic though, so many options. Pretty much any cool coaster name would work well in a Robot Wars environment. Raptor. Baron. Taron. Talon. Thunderbird. Powder Keg. Railblazer. Iron Rattler. Boulder Dash. Fenix. Volare.
It's actually much harder to think of a coaster that wouldn't be suitable. For that reason, I'm going for Woody Woodpeckers Nuthouse Bot.

No, wait... Dog Fart Bot.
Yes, that's the one. Dog Fart Bot.
 
roomraider said:
Wasn't Gemini also a robot on robot wars? I seem to remember it was the first ever cluster bot in the UK show.

@Serena when can we expect the Rollercoaster vs names of Gladiators Venn diagram?
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Omg, I need to make a Gladiatiors one too!

And yes, now that I think of it, there deffo was a cluster bot named Gemini. One more for the diagram!
 
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