There isn’t much that can prepare you mentally for actually having an opportunity to fight for the Giant Nut. Many members of Team HUGE have had opportunities to win events in the past, whether that be local events or NHRL tournaments. And we’ve even actually won some of them! But the specific stresses, the atmosphere, the effort level, and the costs of Battlebots just make it something exceptional compared to anything else. This is the moment you dream of.
With a win in the Round of 8 over Witch Doctor, we realized that World Championship 7 was crossing from “a great year” into something even more magical. To be fighting for a spot in the finals, after the last 2 seasons HUGE had, served to show how far we had come and how much we had learned.
Copperhead would be our third opponent in a row that was a very short, compact, and highly-competitive vertical spinner. For lack of a better term, we had talked a lot of smack talk for a long time about the small-vertical-spinner type of opponent. And in our last two fights, HUGE lost the use of its weapon due to getting punched very hard upwards (MadCatter) and hitting a very solid object (Witch Doctor).
As for Copperhead, looking at the bot, they appear to have two main design goals:
Punch things upwards very hard
Be a very solid object for people to hit
Crap.
There isn’t much that can prepare you mentally for actually having an opportunity to fight for the Giant Nut. Many members of Team HUGE have had opportunities to win events in the past, whether that be local events or NHRL tournaments. And we’ve even actually won some of them! But the specific stresses, the atmosphere, the effort level, and the costs of Battlebots just make it something exceptional compared to anything else. This is the moment you dream of.
With a win in the Round of 8 over Witch Doctor, we realized that World Championship 7 was crossing from “a great year” into something even more magical. To be fighting for a spot in the finals, after the last 2 seasons HUGE had, served to show how far we had come and how much we had learned.
Copperhead would be our third opponent in a row that was a very short, compact, and highly-competitive vertical spinner. For lack of a better term, we had talked a lot of smack talk for a long time about the small-vertical-spinner type of opponent. And in our last two fights, HUGE lost the use of its weapon due to getting punched very hard upwards (MadCatter) and hitting a very solid object (Witch Doctor).
As for Copperhead, looking at the bot, they appear to have two main design goals:
Punch things upwards very hard
Be a very solid object for people to hit
Crap.
Witch Doctor is a legendary opponent, having competed in every prior season of Battlebots. They’ve been to the Round of 8 four times, overall Runner-Up twice, 2021 Golden Bolt Runner-Up, won two Bounty tournaments, won Re:Mars 2019, and in general cemented their place as one of the faces of the modern era of Battlebots. All of this adds up to the fact that the frame and construction of Witch Doctor is really well-dialed, having been through so many iterations and top-tier fights since 2015. Hitting Witch Doctor was one of the most solid objects that HUGE had ever struck!
After a big knockout of Skorpios, HUGE finds itself in the Round of 16 for the first time since World Championship 4! Way back then, MadCatter was a rookie hammer-robot with lifting arms, mostly attending as a practice run for their eventual appearances on the Chinese robot fighting show “King of Bots”. They’re very serious contenders now, with a ton of power in their weapon and a configurable strategy with the lifting arm… but they’re also a normal short vertical spinner, who cannot reach the body of HUGE!
There’s no time like the present to see if our hammer-saw armor works, because we’ve never fought one before in the 250lb weight class. Skorpios is a robot known for tanking some of the hardest-hitting weapons in the sport, and we had no reason to try to rip apart a plow that Tombstone could barely scratch. Skorpios ran with their classic hammer-saw and T-rex blade, as well as their taller wedge which last fought Bloodsport in 2021.
The fight that the world wanted to see! As soon as Starchild was announced as a BattleBots entrant, the fans demanded a “Big Wheel Bowl”. We’ve known that this day would come for months, and had been considering our strategy the entire time. Our team theorized that this fight would be “four wheels with a lot of noise that you can’t see”, but we’re happy to have been wrong and made such a spectacle.
We’re 2-0, and feeling great, after wins over Shatter and Blip! HUGE’s next test comes in the form of the dual horizontal/vertical spinning weapons of Fusion. Horizontal spinning weapons in particular are a longtime nemesis of HUGE-style designs as they can chop down our wheels and disable us. Fusion is the spiritual successor to a robot named “Son of Whyachi”, who did just that during the 2019 season. Luckily we’ve learned a lot since that fight and our fingers are crossed that we can change our fortunes this time around. Fusion has been looking extremely strong so far this year, most notably splitting Witch Doctor’s entire weapon hub, which was held together with identical screws to the ones used in HUGE’s weapon hub. We’ll need to win quickly to avoid too much damage!
After scoring an opening-round win over Shatter, we were feeling great! Another non-spinning robot was up next as we were scheduled to fight the little blue menace, Blip. We had just seen Blip go three minutes with End Game, including being hit hard enough to cause End Game to break their own weapon. Blip was highlighted on our schedule as a great opportunity for us - they were a high-ranking robot, but one that HUGE is well-suited towards fighting. Including the win over Shatter, this could mean a 2-0 record and near-guaranteed path into the Round of 32, considering the caliber of opponents that we were beating.
HUGE hadn’t faced a power-focused hammer since fighting Chomp, way back in 2018. At that time, we had no configs, no weight, no plan, and a lot of hope. We didn’t expect to damage Shatter’s hammer quickly, or at all, during this fight. Success for HUGE meant keeping Shatter’s hammer away from any fragile components, and preferably wasting its energy into our wheels.
Given the shape of HUGE and how difficult it is to hit, we weren’t surprised when Shatter opted to run their “Mary Special” single-piece hammer. It’s designed with more striking area, and many sharp serrations to try to cut belts. Shatter has a documented history of firing their hammer into any rotating object that comes near them, and we expected a strategy like this to try to cut any of the 8 belts that power the wheels and blade of HUGE.
After a 2-3 run in the Battlebots World Championship + the Battlebots: Champions spinoff show, we felt that HUGE still had unfinished business in 2021. The power, speed, and fast spinup of HUGE was really uplifting for us after a tough 2020 season, and we finally felt like the robot was starting to scratch at the limits of its real potential. Plus, we were itching to fight a normally-sized robot after three straight fights against tall, body-threatening opponents.
