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??’.
