Battlebots

En and I just watched the penultimate episode of Battlebots 2019 just now and we had an interesting convo.

All of the final eight are some variety of stored energy bots. By stored energy, I mean something that isn't a one-and-done weapon. Most of the weapons in the top 16 are exactly this -- weapons that have inertia. Even bots like Hydra are a stored energy bot in terms of a hydraulic accumulator.

The problem with bots that aren't stored energy bots is that you can only supply so much force to a weapon from the batteries. Batteries have a certain intrinsic internal resistance that you can't really combat. You can choose batteries based on this, but batteries that have low resistance also wind up being heavy.

All of these are cases where you need to meter out energy to get the weapon going and not just try to do something extreme with just the battery.