Check out this fight in BattleBots Season 5, Episode 2, or here on Facebook.
HUGE’s first fight of the 2020 season, and one that we think bot-fans everywhere were waiting for! We’re good friends with the Mammoth team, and knew a lot about the changes that they made leading into the 2020 season. We expected them to be flying around the box (both driving, and launching themselves), and knew that it surprise fans. This match certainly did not disappoint!
Our strategy going into this fight was to spin downwards, and try to suck ourselves deeper into Mammoth’s frame and hit important pieces of their robot. With one of the slower spinning blades in the field, we would need to use all of the energy we had stored to do the maximum amount of damage to Mammoth. We also had hope that we could climb the frame, possibly hitting some of the weapon assembly and chain area. There was no way to predict how this fight would pan out, and 10 attempts at this fight would lead to 10 different results.
While our strategy is debatable, we didn’t have enough energy in the end to be able to sever the tubes forming Mammoth’s frame. Upwards or downwards, this strategy would have needed multiple hits in any location to do crippling damage, as any upwards hits would have just pushed Mammoth away from our weapon. This was a “drawing board moment”, when we knew that the future of HUGE would likely need to be much more powerful, to stay competitive with an opponent like Mammoth. On the bright side, we landed about 1 inch from fight-changing hit to Mammoth’s weapon chain, and did some impressive damage. Mammoth’s strategy of a floppy plastic lifter also played out well for them, as it was able to flex from the hits and dissipate our energy.
It took about 5 minutes of flexing and tugging to get HUGE unstuck from the wall, so we would have loved to see whether or not a longer support pole could have kept us from getting stuck. As a consolation, the bot was pulled out undamaged and ready for the next fight!
Photo Gallery
Team photo pre-fight!
Mammoth’s configuration for this fight, with the plastic lifting arm.
HUGE’s configuration for this fight, with our longest blade
This was intimidating to stand underneath, you can see that none of us are watching HUGE.
Damage to the left upright
And damage to the right upright
Sometimes you land an inch away from victory!
Photo Credit: Dan Longmire