Fight Breakdown
Jonathan Schultz
HUGE vs. Sawblaze - WCVII Fight #9 - Finals!

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.

HUGE vs. Sawblaze - WCVII Fight #9 - Finals!
Fight Breakdown
Jonathan Schultz
HUGE vs. Copperhead - WCVII Fight #8 - ...

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.

HUGE vs. Copperhead - WCVII Fight #8 - Semi-Finals!

Hydra

HUGE vs. Hydra - 2020 Fight #2

HUGE vs. Hydra - 2020 Fight #2

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.