Back in 2015, engineers at the US-based MegaBots built a giant fighting robot, and challenged their counterparts in Japan to a duel.
“We have a giant robot, you have a giant robot,” MegaBots’s co-founder Matt Oehrlein said at the time. “You know what needs to happen.”
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Two years later, we’re finally going to get to see the epic battle go down. Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industries agreed to take on the Americans, squaring its 13-foot, 6.5-ton Kuratas against MegaBots’s 16-foot, 12-ton Eagle Prime in a fight to the robotronic death. You can catch the showdown Tuesday at 10 PM streaming on Twitch.
Sadly, we don’t get to watch the showdown happen in real time. According to the Verge, the two robots already ripped each other to shreds back in September, spreading several rounds of carnage over the span of a few days. It all went down in an abandoned steel mill in Japan, where no one—except for Team America and the Japanese squad—witnessed the outcome. MMA commentator Mike Goldberg and robotics expert Saura Naderi accompanied the action with a play by play.
While the battle of the bots might not be live, it will be metal as all hell. The Eagle Prime is strapped with an eight-foot chainsaw, a massive robot claw, and a set of cannons that can fire oversized paintballs at more than 100 MPH.
What the Kuratas lacks in bulk, it makes up for with speed and cutting-edge technology. Suidobashi’s rig boasts two gatling guns, a complex targeting system, and a massive metal fist— not to mention a team behind it that seems hell-bent on tearing America’s robot to smithereens.
“If we’re going to win this, I want to punch them to scrap and knock them down to do it,” the Kuratas’s creator said.
The particularly terrifying thing here is that there are going to be actual human beings manning the death traps, locked inside their killing machines as they shoot, claw, and slam each other to pieces. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like anyone was seriously injured in September’s fight—but the same can’t be said for the robots. MegaBots told the Verge the battle raged on until one robot was either knocked down, destroyed, or forced to surrender.
You can stream the epic battle Tuesday on Twitch. Thanks to MegaBots’s apocalyptic countdown clock, you’ll know the second the fight breaks out.
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