THE SWARM AT BATTLEBOTS - NOVEMBER 2001

Here we go again! Here's The Swarm lined up, ready to fight in their first battle.

Fight 1: vs. Swirlee

The Swarm's first and only fight this season was against Swirlee- a very mean spinner with a very unique centrally-mounted spinning disc.

The match began with all three bots from The Swarm attacking Swirlee, trying to stop or slow down his spinning disc. Mosquito, with his much lower profile, managed to get underneath the reach of Swirlee's disc, and started to push Swirlee around. Meanwhile, Dragonfly and Locust swarmed into Swirlee's disc, each time bots went flying (us, not him unfortunately). Just as I was about to give up and start helping push Mosquito, I went in for one last hit, this one was enough to impact Locust so hard that the back supporting structure of the master power switch snapped off! Note that this was totally enclosed, so it was pure inertia that disabled Locust. Man, that's a lot of power! Well, with one third of The Swarm down, the other two kept attacking. Dragonfly got a couple more hits in before he lost one side drive chain, leaving him to flail only in wide circles and arcs. Mosquito pushed Swirlee the whole time, and at least once was able to push him into the spike strip, stopping the disc.

Regardless of our valiant efforts, The Swarm lost this match.

Judge Decision on this fight was a relatively close 20-25... almost, but not quite!