I don't really think it's the banging thats tripping the robots. Our robot is a, quite frankly, kamikazee. We ran out of weight for a claw mechanism, so all we have no is really powerful/fast drive system. Guess what we use it for - running into other robots... and hard (team 596, the Sci-Clones can attest to that - at the nyc regional, we kinda bent one of their pnumatic cylinders. But don't worry, there are no hard feelings between us - actually we picked them as our alliance partners =D).
Anyways, at the SPBLI Long Island regional, we were tripping our main breaker like mad. During our practice rounds, we were flipping the breaker every few minutes. This was fixed by drilling some bolts into our thick wheels and actually decreasing their surface area (see what we mean
here ). The wheels themselves were dragging while turning (tank-steering), and this was over-working our motors. This fixed our main breaker problems.
Even so, practically every other round during the actual competition, our main breaker flipped and we sat there. We were ramming a lot, and that probably contributed to it somewhat, but our main problem was with the drive train. We have the opportunity to go down on treads (for uber-power). Turns out this was our problem. The treads seemed to have too much friction moving. Some of our idlers didn't spin that well, and so (I think this is how you describe it) the motors were working too hard. Bam - we lost power. Anyways, at the NYC Regional, we added some bearings to our idlers so that they spun like a dream, and presto - our breaker problems were no more.
Few robots were banging as hard as we do. Look at the scratches on the front plate in the above picture, we bent some Bosch extrusion, heck, we even chipped some lexan - who knows what we did to other robot (again, sorry 596) =D Anyways, what it comes down to is that although banging did have some effect on the breaker, I suggest that if your still having breaker problems after hanging the breaker loosely and perpendicular to the front of the robot, you look into your drive train, not your playing tactics.