MegaBots - What Went Wrong (Part 1)

_{Promotional graphic for the Giant Robot Duel}

Remember MegaBots? No, not “Mega Bloks,” MegaBOTS. They’re the guys behind the ‘Giant Robot Duel.’ Billed as a fantasy become reality for those hoping to see mech fights outside of the movies, the event itself resulted in disappointment.

MegaBots was founded in 2014 by Matt Oehrlein and Gui Cavalcanti around a year before they issued a challenge to fight Suidobashi Heavy Industry’s Kuratas mech, in June 2015. Unfortunately, in what's become a bit of a trend with the MegaBots team, they were overly optimistic. Instead of being ready to fight in one year as the original challenge stated, the fight would occur roughly two years after the challenge was originally issued. The reason for this was that the team had decided to build a whole new mech from the ground up. The Mark II was out and Eagle Prime was in.

Here's where the problems become apparent, the design philosophy is the same as the business philosophy - "Make Everything Cool!" Which is fine to a degree, you need your company to have some personality if you're going to start a robo-fighting league but you need to put pragmatism first.

Engineering is a balance of functionality, safety, and budget. Ignoring any of those three pillars results in failure. Of the three, safety is the one I’d say they focused on the most, this sort of event is already a nightmare insurance-wise, adding a fatality or even a serious injury to the equation would cause the actuarials to kill this in its infancy.

The need to focus on safety hamstrings the next pillar – functionality. Many say the tech isn't there yet, but the truth is the tech will never be there. It's not just a matter of speeding up a few actuators or reinforcing the cockpit. No matter what was done or how much time passed, having a human pilot ensured that the bots would never be able to duke it out the way people envisioned. Even neglecting cutting, shooting, and carnage, the sheer momentum alone from bots this size is enough to place any pilot in peril. Without a ludicrously impractical system or the invention of star trek-esque inertial dampeners, there is no way to safely pilot these giant mechs at full power in an unscripted fight.

Expense is the next fatal flaw in their design. Do you know how much a Battlebot costs? According to Paul Ventimiglia, season 1 champion of the rebooted series, the money spent by the teams on their bots in season 1 ranged from $30,000 (Yeti, I believe) to just under $110,000 (Bronco, because they brought two).

These are for the 250 lb (113 kg) weight class. The teams of Battlebots all have to find sponsors at this level to avoid bankrupting themselves. The 250 lb class is already 30 – 50 lbs heavier than the 200 – 220 lb class most other competitions, such as Robogames, use as their maximum weight class. This is why, particularly in season 1, you'd see bots designed to be around 200 lbs that had several pounds of removable armor attached – many of the bots had been designed with other competitions in mind.

_{The full team in a promotional picture}

This problem is only amplified at the scale MegaBots was seeking to fight. Rather than attempting a Real Steel level of competition, they decided to go straight to the Mechawarrior level. The sheer cost of operating and repairing the bots at such a level of destruction would require a billionaire with an infinite passion and a willingness to burn money at a mindboggling rate. The problem for MegaBots is that Bill Gates and other with that amount of wealth didn't grow up watching Megas XLR and didn't become rich by throwing money at every impulse. Even Elon Musk always tries to find a way to make his hobbies financially viable, from rockets to tunnels, he takes calculated risks. The key word in this case is "calculated," Megabots primary mission would be to establish the financial infrastructure and template that other teams could use to follow in their footsteps. The odds were never going to be in their favor, particularly at this financial level.

Now, I can understand why they decided to go down that route, they were hoping to capitalize on the excitement such a scale would bring. Unfortunately, they would need to deliver on that promise of action in order to hold onto their large fairweather demographic. Someone who understands the realities of and has an interest in watching engineering of that scale would be willing to give leeway when the bots were slow due to tempered expectations.

Due to MegaBots' hype ability, however, the casual audience never had tempered expectations. If you followed their marketing, you'd think you were about to see an epic mechanical bloodbath. MegaBots continued to hype up the event past the point that they would have known the fight (which, in a wise nod to reality, was even prerecorded) could never hope to meet their marketing. Concerns over the speed of the bot were met with assurances of "don't worry, it's only at a quarter power" despite the fact that this is a bot that uses hydraulics, instead of servos, due to its size. It was never going to be fast.

Predictably, after the event, much of the audience was enraged, instead of real life Gundams, it was the equivalent of two pieces of heavy construction equipment colliding. Now, there was no real way to get past this, physics is a cruel mistress and as I’ve already stated, the bots were never going to be doing cartwheels. The real issue that turns the event from a manageable case of undue expectations into a fatal blow for the company as it existed is the management of the event itself.

Part 2