I am a massive fan of BattleBots. Have been for years. If you saw me gushing about the most recent season on the Couch Avocadoes threads the past couple months, you are likely already aware of that. (Sorry, by the way.) Now that the season is over (and, perhaps more importantly, now that I have the ability to publish threads of my own), I thought it would be fun to take over the open threads for a day to show off two of my current favorite bots, ending with the perilous pizza itself, RIPperoni.

If you are unaware of BattleBots, it is a robot fighting competition show that initially ran for five seasons on Comedy Central in the early 2000s before being revived in 2015 on ABC and then Discovery. The revival just wrapped up its seventh season last month, with an eighth planned for next year. Two hundred and fifty pound bots pummel each other for three minutes to see which one survives the longest (or, at least, survives the best). At the end of the season a champion is crowned and awarded the Giant Nut. (Yes, that is what the trophy is called.)

The carnage. The wacky physics. The eccentric personalities. BattleBots has it all.

**I only talk about the qualifying rounds below and don’t discuss the end-of-season tournament bracket, but if you are worried about spoilers for Season 7 of BattleBots, skip ahead to the comments.**

One of the biggest challenges faced by bots with vertical spinning weapons (which is by far the majority of bots in recent seasons) is gyroscopic precession. Essentially, the forces created by the fast spinning bar/disk/drum make it difficult to turn quickly without lifting one side of the bot off the ground. Enter this season’s most entertaining rookie, the pizza-themed bot RIPperoni. What makes this bot special is that it has a counter-rotating flywheel that cancels out the gyroscopic forces of the bot’s weapon, allowing it to turn on a dime. Theoretically. The system failed in its first fight, resulting in one of the wackier matches we have seen yet:

Luckily they got everything working after that and fared very well against two of the best bots in the competition, End Game and Copperhead, proving definitively that they are a contender.

Have a good night, everyone!