Check out this fight in BattleBots World Championship VII (marked “Season 8” on most platforms), Episode 14. Or check it out below on youtube:

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. What we couldn’t predict back then was how rough of a schedule that Starchild would have up to this point, ending up at 0-3 after a string of brutal matchups against Overhaul, Mammoth, and Gigabyte. Considering HUGE’s 3-0 record, this ended up being a fairly unequal matchup, but (knowing the 3lb Starchild’s power, and unique ability to hit the top of our frame) not one that we could take lightly.

We viewed this match as an opportunity to play for a high seed going into the tournament, and hopefully give us an easier path than ever before. Given our intense past first round opponents of Bite Force, Whiplash, Whiplash (again), and Uppercut in prior years, a lower-seeded Round 1 opponent gives us an opportunity to change our fate and finally have our tournament breakthrough. This puts the pressure on to win in an emphatic way, as a committee would expect of a 3-0 robot fighting an 0-3 robot… but how do you do that with such a unique matchup and opponent? We’ve never even fought a hammersaw before, never mind something like this!

When the path is unclear, we have to lean on our past experience to come up with a plan. During a little-known local heavyweight event in 2019, we had reconfigured HUGE into a thwackbot lovingly named “HUGH”, and actually had the opportunity to fight another bigwheeled spinner robot known as “Button Lee”, from the SMEEEE team. Basically a role reversal! From this, we learned that robots like this are likely to hit each other in the front of either frame, and that (surprisingly) pushing power becomes a factor in a fight between two low-grip robots. This informed us to run a configuration very similar to our fight with Shatter, including an extra tegris layer underneath our titanium top plate, lightened wheels, and our most aggressive “S-blade” resharpened after its fight with Fusion. The sideburns sadly had to stay off the robot, as their weight had been taken up with reinforcements to the weapon hub and switch mounting done after HUGE’s fight with Blip. Close watchers will even notice a missing screw from one of HUGE’s wheels, doing what we had to do to make the scale read 250 lbs rather than 251! Starchild ran a fairly normal configuration as well, mounting extra tegris to the body of the robot and a large array of fresh parts (wheels, disc, etc) after getting battered around by Gigabyte in their last fight.

Let’s see how the fight went!

Our risky strategy was to push up as close as we could to Starchild and stay there, hoping to hit something important, jam them up, or push them around. It worked! This exchange took off the plastic guard on Starchild’s blade that prevents it from hitting the ground, serving largely to disable their weapon.

We tried and tried and tried to get Starchild onto the upper deck! It just wasn’t meant to be, but this hit while stuck in the screws destroyed one of Starchild’s gearboxes, disabling one of their wheels.

And once Starchild fell over, we took the opportunity to hit the weapon chain, just ensuring that there could be no last-minute heroics…

… and accidentally cleaved off most of the weapon supporting hardware, causing its later removal (and firing some of it into the lighting grid).

A sincere apology to the crew that has to sweep the floor after fights.

Credit to Starchild for once again powering through to a judge’s decision after such an insane fight. No matter how you feel about Starchild, it has not been knocked out yet! Let’s take a look at the damage from that fight.

One of our motor dust covers melted during the fight, and got ingested into the motor, just one of the many things that you have to check on between every match.

These motors and electronics were working hard!

The largest of a few gouges in HUGE’s frame.

By our count, HUGE took three small hits to the body, each leaving a small gouge but luckily not penetrating deeper. Plus so much rubber scuffing.

A close-up on the gearbox that was hit when Starchild was stuck in the screws. The other side was disabled when the chain itself was struck on the last hit of the fight.

Starchild was nice enough to give us a great trophy after the fight, their top armor!

Battlebots shared a photo as well of the busted arena light!

With a quick trip to the judges, HUGE brings home a career-best 4-0 regular season and sets its sights on the playoffs once again! This season so far has been an amazing validation of our team’s efforts over the years to turn HUGE into a versatile, dangerous robot. Finally we’re able to reap the rewards of the potential shown in flashes during past seasons. For now, we’re left to speculate on upcoming opponents, watch fights, and repair HUGE for the first round of the playoffs!

We’ve seen the Starchild team catch a lot of flak for their struggles during World Championship 7, and wanted to talk about unique robots for a moment. Bringing a unique robot to Battlebots is inherently a risk. If it works, you’re a genius. If it fails, people think you’re a fool. The Starchild team had every reason to think that Starchild would work at this level after so much success in smaller weight classes, and most importantly, they actually tried something new. There would be no variety in modern Battlebots without the Mammoths, HUGEs, SMEEs, Horizons, and Starchilds of the world. And there would be no variety in the sport without the creative people of the past. At one point in the 2000s, even Tombstone was a wild and novel concept. Shell spinners were an insane concept upon arrival in the 1990s. Hammer-saws are a particularly recent one, as there were none in Battlebots until 2019 even. Anything that works is quickly adopted and copycatted (just as we borrowed our wheel design from Robot Wars’ ‘Gabriel’), and people forget just how creative all of those original builders were.

This entire game is built off the back of people who push themselves to innovate and to try something new. Brandon and the Starchild team deserve a lot of credit for trying something very new, and a lot of praise for entering and surviving 4 fights against a string of opponents seemingly hand-picked to be completely untouchable by Starchild’s weaponry. Nobody has yet seen a full-power working Starchild against a “normal” robot. Our team’s view is that Battlebots wouldn’t be fun if we weren’t attempting something unique, and able to blaze a trail to accomplish things that nobody has ever done before. Anybody willing to be creative deserves far more credit than a new copycat vertical spinner, or the world’s hundredth slow wedge robot. We aren’t counting out the Starchild idea yet, and hope they stick with it. It could surprise a lot of people.

We often heard one other question after this fight: would Starchild’s last two fights lead to second thoughts on utilizing Tegris for wheels on HUGE? Our answer is: absolutely not. A competitive BattleBot can’t afford the weight to bring wheels that can resist a giant weapon for three straight minutes. Starchild’s tegris wheels bought it 1 minute against Gigabyte’s shell, and 1:45 against HUGE’s giant bar spinner, before beginning to really collapse. While the final result is grisly, it’s a product of a “feed them a wheel” last-ditch strategy, which was only utilized due to other system failures on the robot that happened earlier in the fight. The job of the wheels is to eat enough time and hits for HUGE or Starchild to otherwise win the fight or disable the opponent’s weapon, as shown by HUGE’s fights with Fusion and Captain Shrederator. By this metric, the tegris did its job, likely better than UHMW wheels would have (while also being lighter). If anything, it will influence our strategy to be more aggressive in this style of fights, now knowing the end result if HUGE cannot win fast enough.

And anyhow it better work, because we’ll be using it again soon!

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: JCRB Photography