[Al Skierkiewicz]

Battery Damage?!?
Yes it can happen. In practice, we had a terrible hit that launched our battery out of the practice robot. Now it's a boat anchor. No output and no continuity, so here is what I think happpened...
These batteries are really six individual batteries inside a big plastic case. The individual cells are connected (in series) internally with large metal bus bar. The buss bar is rigid and in a repeated impact situation can be expected to fail due to cracking. Since there are seven of these bars in every battery, a stress failure in any one will put you out of commission. A crack can show up as loss of capacity, intermittant output, or no output. Temperature will also play a role here, having a cold battery check good only to fail after the heating of running a few seconds of match time.
Thankfully, our death was in an old battery that was unfit for competition and soon to be recycled.
Good Luck All