Now that the fight has aired, and the smoke has (literally) cleared, we can tell you about what happened during and after the combat (to find about how BattleBots is set up, and how teams prepare, check out my earlier Spectrum guest post). The first thing to know is that although there's been several weeks between the airing of our fight with Glitch and last night's bout, in reality these two brawls occurred on the same day. The fight against Glitch happened at 10 in the morning, and the fight against Cobalt was at 7 that evening. To be fair to the BattleBots producers, this compressed time frame wasn't their original intent but was due to problems in getting Glitch ready (which ultimately led to Raptor captain Chuck Pitzer helping them out in the Pit) that pushed the two rounds together.īetween the time it took to get back to the Pit and the time needed to check out the robot with the BattleBots folks before the next round, Team Raptor was left with less than 7 hours to try to repair the damage from our first battle. The rookie team behind Glitch are such sweethearts, and we really bonded with them on set. But in reality it caused us a four-day delay.
And Glitch left us with quite some damage. They busted our weapons and electronic components and took a bite out of the side of the bot. We needed to swap a bunch of things out, and even machine some new parts, and we sadly had to lose our flamethrower. Mercifully, as I mentioned in my previous post, the Pit and surrounding tents are amazingly well equipped for this kind of work. Chuck was mostly to be found in the welding tent, which had all kinds of cool welding tools sponsored by Lincoln Electric, while the others were running around working on a new configuration optimized against Cobalt. You wouldn't know it from this picture, but we'd just finished a very tight race against time to get Ghost Raptor's weight under the acceptable limit. We were already quite tired: I slept only three hours the night before, and the fatigue may have led to us making an important mistake. One important thing when you create a new configuration is that you need to watch how it affects the weight of your robot, as it cannot exceed 114 kilograms. Knowing Cobalt's weapon-a heavy vertical spinner-we choose to put a more beefy (and thus also heavier) blade on Ghost Raptor's horizontal spinner, and with all the custom protective parts that Chuck was welding, we totally forgot to recheck the new weight. So once we loaded Ghost Raptor up with its LiPo batteries in the battery tent, and went for the official weigh-in, it turned out she was well overweight.Ī few moments later we were getting scooped up and thrown into the wall. Oops! And then there was a big explosion. We were already being called into the arena to get in line, so we needed to decide fast: a lighter blade? Less protection? We were racing against time at that point.
We took off some of the protective front parts and had to remove one of the pair of forward projecting forks, so that is actually the reason Ghost Raptor went onto the battlegrounds with just one, which I thought looked kind of hilarious.
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