This Friday I went to the survival research lab show in San Jose. From the posts I've seen on Vox already, it looks like there were a lot of 6A's there as well! Here's my collection of photos from this event:
SRL has been around since at least the late 90's if not longer, and has been buildling up a collection of scary, loud and dangerous machines who's sole purpose is to destroy each other. SRL has actually been banned from San Francisco.
The show itself is basically a magnification of bredth and scale of what I used to do as a kid in my back yard; I would set up elaborate situations with firework tanks and other firework vehicles and stage massive battles that left burning mounds of ash and charred, corroded metal in its wake. Thus this show had obvious appeal to me. Plus there's just something about fighting robots that everyone enjoys.
Most of the robots spat fire of some sort, some had huge mandibles for picking up and tearing through things and then there was the giant tesla coil for electrifying the large amounts of metal moving about.
Of interest was one machine that was a replica of a german V1 rocket engine on wheels. The V1 rocket engine was actually a pulse jet which works by igniting gas in rapid controlled explosions. During WWII it was called a buzz bomb because this pulsing made a buzzing sound as it flew. This replica was tuned to trade thrust for sound. The pulses were timed at 45 Hz which made this machine produce an extremely low and bassy sound each time it bellowed fire.
Another interesting machine also used pulse jets, but used much smaller ones that were ignited by arcs of electricity visible on the outside of the engine. These pulse jets were mounted on a hovercraft skirt to make a pulse jet hovercraft. Everytime the engines panned across the crowd we would feel a blast of hot air that was exciting and slightly scarry.
Finally ther was the giant telsa coil. No much to say about this one except that it produced a lot of lightning and was also pretty scary. Hooray for fighting robots!