Check out this fight in BattleBots World Championship VII (marked “Season 8” on most platforms), Episode 5.

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, that HUGE is reasonably 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.

Blip presents a unique challenge for HUGE with its small size and big speed. Both of the Team Seems Reasonable machines (Tantrum and Blip) have these strengths, and it has led to remarkable success for both robots. HUGE is naturally designed for fighting small vertical spinning robots, as well as being able to generally withstand control-focused robots. But between Blip and Tantrum, Blip in our minds posed the bigger threat. Blip has the ability to control HUGE around the arena better than Tantrum, which gives them an advantage in the Control and Aggression parts of the judging criteria; categories that HUGE isn’t strong in already. Coupling that with a robot that is insanely resilient to Damage (our one scoring advantage) and we saw many avenues to make this a close, or losing fight. While many fans assumed that HUGE vs. Flipper = easy win, we never saw this as a simple or easy fight!

With a really short turnaround between fighting Shatter and Blip, we quickly had to get the robot prepared. The light tegris wheels were shelved for our classic UHMW wheels, which should make for softer landings after flips. Our extra aggressive “S-blade” also came off the robot, with its sharpness saved for another day against a softer opponent. In its place, we fitted HUGE’s longest single-tooth weapon to make sure that we can hit Blip as hard as possible. A weapon like this was last used in a 2021 grudge match against Captain Shrederator, where it notably cut a fist-sized hole in the side of the shell.

Blip, on the other hand, has a tent in their pit. We really had no idea of their strategy going into this fight up until very nearly fight time. They ended up with a mountain of extra tegris on top of Blip’s frame, along with long poles to reach down to the floor, allowing Blip to more-easily flip underneath the wheels. We have to say, Blip in his little Zorro mask was a cute sight.

This proved to be a good configuration change for Blip, and served to give them even more of a control advantage while upgrading their already impressive defenses. We knew that we would have to disable some part of Blip’s drive or weapon, while taking no damage, to have a chance of winning. Let’s see how the fight itself went:

Blip got off to a strong start, throwing HUGE repeatedly into the air.

In the beginning, it felt like HUGE’s hits were really just bouncing off.

But once transitioning to spinning downwards, the hits started really landing. This is the hit that got stuck in the top of Blip.

Garrett photobombs a mid-unstick selfie!

Pause! Well, this is new… HUGE has never been stuck in any robot at Battlebots before. If it had gone to the judges at this point, we may have lost, so thanks Trey for getting the robots unstuck! It was weird to have a conversation and a think mid-fight about how things were going, and plan for the latter half of the fight. This hit looks a lot more aggressive than anything we did when hitting into the outer armor brim, so the plan was to stick with downwards-spinning from here on out whenever possible.

For the second fight in a row, HUGE plays “found your Titanium”.

The top was pretty caved in on Blip, but conversely HUGE wasn’t spinning so well. Happy that this fight ended when it did.

Finally, what felt like the longest fight of our lives (the unstick took at least 15 minutes) drew to a close. By the end, I could tell that HUGE’s spinup had slowed more than usual. Blip’s flipper was long-dead since the unstick, and both robot’s drivetrains were at 100%. We were certainly still hitting hard, but fingers were definitely crossed that the judges wouldn’t hold that spinup time against us. We hoped for a scorecard with 4-1 Damage to HUGE, 1-2 Aggression to Blip, and 1-2 Control to Blip, netting HUGE a narrow 6-5 victory. To have that damage score only at 3-2 would be fatal. The judges spent a while considering, before Faruq finally announced a unanimous decision for HUGE! We’re 2-0!

As we had hoped, an evenly-split 6-5 win across every card. I could make an argument that hitting somebody 20 times with a blade implies more aggression than a wedge pushing something around (thanks Derek), but that’s an argument for another day. The judges have been consistent in awarding most control and aggression points to HUGE’s opponents no matter what we do, so all we can do is adapt to prioritize weapon power, and therefore damage! Speaking of, lets take a look at the damage, because there really was loads of it.

A quick video of the frantic work done after fights outside. While trying to get the batteries out of the robot, you come across so many things broken. A mix of troubleshooting, “I can’t believe that broke”, and “look at what you did to us”. It’s so much fun.

We immediately noticed that our power switches had broken from their mounts inside of HUGE, and were free-floating. This was repaired by using epoxy to attach thin sheets of Garolite to the outside of the 3D printed supports. Having spare prints doesn’t help much when your design is flawed. The weapon center hub was also very rigid and very hot.

Here is the source of the slow weapon spinup. This is “galling”, when a solid bushing begins to deposit material onto the object that it is turning around. This failure brings a serious serious risk of locking up the weapon during the fight. We attributed this to the blade itself, which we noticed was slightly out-of-balance during a pre-fight test (but far too late to balance it). This high-frequency vibration, visible during the fight slow-mo even, would put a ton of extra load on our bearings.
It took days to figure out how to remove the galling, which was an emergency for the team. We only had two central shafts to use for the entire season due to a manufacturing issue, so this left us with one remaining. We tried lathes, files, sandpaper, and buffing it off. But the final answer was a Harbor Freight 4.5” angle grinder polycarbide paint stripping disk (followed by polishing). Without more parts, this had to be used again, and we resolved to alternate shafts between fights, while also polishing after each fight. In addition, all bars would have to be balanced before running them in a fight.
Thank you to Jackpot, Hijinx, and many others who helped us try to get this part repaired!

Some days, it’s better to be lucky than good. These wires inside Blip’s face were unharmed.

These magnets however, were moderately harmed. Many robots are not ready to get punched downwards.

And with that, HUGE makes it through the opening half of its fight night schedule at 2-0! After three days of safety and setup, HUGE fought Shatter and Blip over a span of two days. Due to the pre-scheduling, we knew that HUGE would have two full days to recover and repair before once again fighting back-to-back days, against Fusion and Starchild. The time was well spent catching up on rest after five straight days of hard work, and we got busy fixing damage while figuring out what POSSIBLE configuration that we could be running for Fusion next…

Thanks to HUGE’s sponsors, Mouser Electronics and TTI, Inc. Whenever you need electronic components next, either for hobby or professionally, remember that Mouser and TTI make it possible for HUGE to compete at Battlebots. We couldn’t do it without them!

If you’re interested, also check out our merch store to pick up HUGE gear, or your own pair of angry eyes!

Photo Credits: Dan Longmire, JCRB Photography, and the Blip team