A Recap of Season 4

Fighting out in Long Beach was a long, stressful, and exhilerating experience. Every member of our team was covered in grease and metal chips from sun up to sundown. A few of us found out what Loc-tite tasted like on accident. Us snowfolk also learned that we can’t handle the sunlight.

A 250lb fighting robot is hard to test since its natural tendency is to destroy everything around it. That meant that the Battlebots test box was the first place we could actually spin up to full speed.

Good god.

Every new robot comes with learning pains and ours was no exception. Our first fight with Tantrum and Jasper ended quickly when the magnets on our drive motors shattered; the shards gummed up the motors and the stalling drained our batteries to zero mid-match. After some repairs, we were back in fighting condition.

Mammoth was our next opponent. We went into the fight afraid of a ring-out, but everything turned out better than expected.

Our next fight was against Breaker Box – and it was a fierce one. Landing solid hits on their robot with a wedge in the way was hard; at times, we felt less like a battlebot and more like a sock tumbling in a dryer. But in the end, the box was broken.

Our next fight against scorpios was our first fight against a spinner. They got a few good hits in, but a love-tap to their wheel won us the fight. They were good sports and gave us the wheel as a souvenir.

Our rumble with Railgun and Bloodsport put us on edge; both robots had terrifying spinners that we couldn’t simultaneously prepare for. A rapid ring out from Bloodsport and a short duel with Railgun got us the victory, though, so we ended up in the finals!

Bite Force has a reputation, to say the least. We didn’t know what would happen during our fight, but we knew that it would end with something getting destroyed. We lubed up our chains, tightened our bolts, and hoped for the best.

And to be honest, it was pretty awesome.

Bite Force is a much shorter robot than ours. This means that when our blades hit each other, our robot goes flying sky high. The first hit of the match sent us straight into the walls and shattered a part of the plexiglass barrier. The second hit sadly put us out of commision, but it came at a cost for Bite Force.

Every force has an equal and opposite force. When Bite Force hit us up, we hit them down. The force of that hit shattered their steel shaft and split most of the welds on their frame. It wasn’t enough to kill them during the fight (to be clear, Bite Force is a freakishly well-made robot), but it did force them to rebuild most of their robot.

In the end, we got way further than we expected and learned a lot from our journey. As a wise man once said:

“It’s not about the destination; it’s about punching expensive robots.”