Re: Team UPDATE - 2014-03-25
 

In Dallas, one of the robots was dragging an air tank around for part of the match. Did it extend more than 20 inches past the frame perimeter? Maybe.

Re: Team UPDATE - 2014-03-25
 

I feel like batteries and air tanks not being secured and/or dragging behind the robot should be an auto-disable due to safety reasons.

Re: Team UPDATE - 2014-03-25
 

Mr Lim,

I feel as if both our scenario and 1114's scenario were called properly by refs doing their job correctly. I was not at Waterloo, so I cannot speak for that event, but at Lenape the refs tried to call the game strictly by the rulebook and that is where I believe the problem lies.

At Lenape, Q3-1, one of our alliance partners backed into a team who's intake were two pieces of 1/4" aluminum round stock that at the time of impact was hanging about halfway out of their frame perimeter. The stock bent ever so slightly, and it was called as damage in the frame perimeter - 50pt not 20pt. In fact, at Lenape, G27 was always a 50pt tech foul and never 20, or called as both 50 AND 20 resulting in 70pts of fouls. The team at the end of the match simply bent it back and marched of the field with a win. Q3-2, we were instructed by our alliance captain not to play defense and to avoid contact as much as possible. Meanwhile, whoever had the ball on our alliance would get dog piled by 2/3rds of the other alliance with little to no fear of a tech foul. We felt punished because our entire alliance engineered our robots too well. To add some irony, we later won the quality award - our first ever award at an event other then District Champions. To say the least, no one involved with the team were much too happy about it.

In my opinion, the rulebook is broken. Very broken. Broken to the point where if refs try to call games strictly by the book, it is near impossible to have consistent calls. Penalty values are out of whack. Many matches there were blatantly obvious g27 fouls that were not called simply because the refs were not watching that specific robot at that specific time. I don't blame them - they have much more on their plate then they should have. To sum up Lenape - It was raining tech fouls from the heavens, and it was frustratingly inconstant. We got the short end of the stick, and according to Ether's twitter data, we're currently the unluckiest team in MAR and it's costing us a potential slot at MAR CMP.

Therefore, I lay my blame not in the reffing staff or the head ref or the volunteers of the event, but on FIRST and the GDC themselves for being out of touch and forcing their picture of the game on us at all costs. They need to fix the rules and let it play out, and admit their mistakes so the season can move on.

My frustration comes from my driver returning from the question box telling me that the head ref said (paraphrasing my driver here) 'he is very sorry he had to make that call, and he knows he shouldn't have to, and that this rule is the reason he did not look forward to reffing this game as any team can simply loosen a wire, get hit and lose comms and gain 50-70 points'.

If the head ref knows it is wrong, and I have parents complaining to me that its wrong and I have to tell them we can't do anything about it, my students end up as distressed as they did as a result, and I have students from a team on the OTHER alliance apologizing for winning 'such a troll game', there is something wrong. We know how to lose, we've done it for years. This wasn't a loss. It was downright unfair. I'm sure other teams feel the same way.

Re: Team UPDATE - 2014-03-25
 

This was also us (FRC418) at Arkansas. In SF3-1, we got slammed by another robot, and that dislodged our cleco attachments we were using to hold on our bumper (our bumper is a uni-bumper that wraps around the robot). Our bumper slammed into systems internal to the robot, and broke zip ties mounting the air tanks and dislodged a couple air hoses (they were still connected, but not "out of harm's way"). We replaced the bumper clecos, and looked for damage but nothing looked suspect (we didn't see the broken zip ties), but the air system held air just fine and everything looked good. We went back out for SF3-2 and during autonomous when our drivetrain started moving an air hose got caught by the drivetrain and ripped the hose and air tank off our robot. The end result was us dragging an air tank behind our robot by its air hose. After a few seconds of dragging the air tank around, the FTA disabled our robot from the Scorekeeper Station. We were not 20" outside our bumper zone, but it wasn't what I would call "safe" either.

-Danny