[Tuske427]

So this past Friday was the 30th anniversary work celebration for a coworker of mine, Eric. Most people probably get a cake, or a meal, or a plaque of some sort. This is where we toy designers do things a bit differently. Eric is a robot junky and has a thing for fire, so to celebrate we combine the two and had an event called the terminator competition. It's basically "battle bots" on a budget with a high encouragement of using fire to literally burn the competition into the ground. We are all provided a same RC vehicle to start with, given some rules to keep competition fair including removing the RC function and making it a tethered remote, and the rest is up to our creativity. Learning from my last participation five years ago of over complicating the build (and ultimately losing to breaking the cheap rc components due to too much weight) I kept my truck simple- weapons: fire (road flares) and fuel (lighter fluid shot through a squirt gun), defense (metal shielding), and taunting graphics of said anniversary employee. We compete in five minute rounds. One wins if competition becomes immobilized or is knocked out of the ring. Elimination rounds ensue until one winner remains...

Included are some pics of the entrants, the action of various rounds, a pic of a tree (look closely and you'll see an RC quadricoptor that was shooting video that got stuck), my victory of round one, my technical victory of round 2. I was deemed winner, but my truck was burned up too.

Good times, indeed.