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.
After beating Slap Box, our next step in the bracket was against the rookie horizontal spinner Malice. Malice had just beaten Tracer, and had been dishing out big hits for the whole event. HUGE has historically struggled with horizontal spinners, and we were excited to be able to give our Tegris parts their first real test in the arena.
Bounty Hunters? Bounty Hunters! This is a new format for Battlebots, with a “star” bot posing as the bounty, and 8 challengers fighting in a bracket for the chance to take them on. We were placed into the Witch Doctor bounty, with a first-round match against rookies Slap Box. We were familiar with their test-bed for Slap Box, having fought it with our 30lb Sportsman robot ‘BEEESS??’.
Another year, another tense bracket announcement. We ended up matched against Whiplash, in a rematch of what many thought was 2019’s closest fight. They were bringing in a host of upgrades, including new rubber wheels, a thinner spinning disk, and redesigned armor panels based off their 2019 design. Separately, HUGE was bringing an all-new drive system along with upgraded armor, heavier spinning blade, and a changed strategy from the first fight. So this really could go either way!
At 0-2 and with an undamaged robot, we were simultaneously on the back foot and very prepared for this fight with Kraken. Kraken was coming off an amazing win over returning runner-up Witch Doctor, as well as a razor-thin split-decision loss to the incredibly tough Black Dragon. We knew they were an extremely durable robot, and figured that they would be impossible to knock out.
Well, what can be said that already hasn’t been said. The fight that sparked a thousand arguments. The fight that even Discovery hated.
This was a really interesting fight, and an interesting attachment to try to solve. We went into the fight with a number of plans for how to attack the bike rack, the most successful being our attempt to lift it with the rear support legs of the robot. But after our promising first attempt at that strategy, we were pinned in the corner for the remaining 90 seconds of the fight.
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!
