Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Aerial Assist in 2014 was bad because of the crazy defense, but this year it seems like even the game itself is trying to break your robot. And not only do you have to deal with defense and the defenses, everyone's drivetrains are built to climb over things that happen to be roughly the height of most people's bumpers. Add to that all the brawls between robots' intakes in the neutral zone and it starts to make sense why so many robots this year aren't performing at their best come finals. What do you think? Is FIRST Stronghold the roughest FRC game to date?

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

[sarcasm] Nah, Recycle Rush was rougher. [/sarcasm]

At least you're not fighting as much over the central resources (balls, cans, etc.)

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I would tend to disagree; over the past couple days at MAR Champs we got into many tough fights for boulders in the neutral zone, a couple of which severely incapacitated our robot (a particular battle in semifinals broke our 3D printed camera mount and was the reason our shooting was off in the finals).

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'm not denying there is still a competition for central resources; that will probably always be there. Thing is, there is another source for balls (rolling them into the Secret Passage), so it may lighten up the game a little. Surely, if there were only six balls in the middle, the roughness would be much worse.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I would say yes. Even the field can't handle it. At every event I've seen this year, there has been at least one robot that left a part on the field. Even some of the robots have decided they don't want to play and this year and made a break for it in autonomous! :yikes:

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

When it comes to field-to-robot damage, I would agree that this year is probably one of the most rough I've seen. In terms of robot-to-robot damage though, I would actually call this years game pretty tame. With the field as restricted as it was, and the rules on defense what they were, it made it difficult for many situations that would normally result in robot-to-robot damage to occur.

The issue you brought up with bumpers is more about weight distribution and the "bumper zone" being too large. This was also an issue in 2010 when teams had to mount their bumpers high, and would constantly end up driving up over each other, or pushing each other vertically.

As far as manipulators go, basically any time there is a game where you have to extend some part of your robot outside your frame perimeter (ie, most games) you have the risk of damage to it. I for one, think they should bring back the line that used to be in every game animation that was something to the effect of "robots should be built robustly to withstand impacts from other robots and game pieces". If you're worried you might break it, make it stronger or bring a spare. ;)

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Accompanied by a shot of poor Dozer having something fall on him and breaking as a result. I miss Dozer!

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

It's probably the most brutal in the modern era but the 2v2 era had some doozies. 422 painted their offseason robot red in 2003 primarily to see how much paint they could put on other robots.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Dozer was back this year, just in slightly different form.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

This year is the hardest game on your bot in my opinion. Yes there were some hard hits in aerial assist... but the bots didn't drive over each other. And of course, field to robot damage is definitely the worst this year. The number of bots that broke down 2 or 3 matches into elims (because they had no chance to check the bot between matches) is insane this year.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Yes. This year was rough.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

In 2014, the impacts were mostly in the bumper area from defense, as most teams had intakes that went over the large ball and folded back into the robot to protect them.

This year however, many intakes are lower to go under the low bar, and pick up the small balls, making for mechanisms that occasionally slam into defenses and the floor when crossing. There's also a lot of impact load on the drivetrain from repetitively slamming into the ground with 120-pounds of robot which causes problems with some drivetrains.

So I would say this year is much worse for robot damage.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Yes, In my opinion bots were hurt much more slamming into the ground than other bots. Our bot caught huge air over the rockwall and chevaldefrise, if we had put our 2014 bot through that same stress, the drive train would have just shattered.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'd love to see some data on the number of backup robots called this year versus previous years. Without looking at some data, I qualitatively say that this is easily the roughest game, if not ever, then at least in a long time.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'd say if you don't see hard robot to robot action at your events, you may want to look at some IN competitions sometime. Lots of hard defense in IN this year resulting in 2 red cards and some really heart breaking robot failures. Not sure if any teams have hurt feelings for other teams though. Everyone in IN seems to like each other. Anyway, the big surprise is that a huge amount of the robot to robot hits have been in the neutral zone. Lots of boulder fights and lots of trying to slow cycle times. This robot to robot roughness doesn't happen too much in quals but has definitely happened in elims a lot.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Oh don't get me wrong, lone star had some MAJOR and BRUTAL defense being played. If it hadn't been for some last second saves, we would have been flipped multiple times (luckily it never happened). And yes we are still good friends with everyone, I would be disappointed in anyone that is holding grudges against defense bots, it is part of the game (unless the team was being excessively brutal).

But I still believe that a drive train repeatedly slamming into the ground from almost 2 feet high with a 120 pounds (not including battery) on top of it, is much more stressful on a bot.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

2 feet high? Falling from scaled position? Thanks

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Oops, meant to say 1 foot (flying off of the cheval de frise). And also another source of impact is ramming into that rockwall.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Ah... Yes the cheval de frise. I know some teams with the prefect pressure in their pneumatic wheel would fly a foot high off the rock wall. Did any teams ever get beat up by hitting the portcullis up really fast and it slamming back down on them? But yeah, the defensed definitely have done drive trains a beating

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I don't think I've ever seen a portcullis "slam" down, I personally slowed down to like 25 percent speed when going under the portcullis, so it never had that momentum. (I'm a brutal driver... thank god we had an unbreakable drive train :P) when our bot hit that rock wall at full speed (never measured but estimated to be over 25 ft/sec) the front end would easily get 1.5 feet in the air, and the back (battery is on the back) would get 1 foot in the air

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

There were some really intense fights over resources. Our intake basically needs to be completely rebuilt for St. Louis. Going after that rebound in your own court yard can get competitive....

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Dozer is back this year. Check out the 1:00 mark of 319's reveal video. You can also see us in St. Louis this year.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D9aeWRQLmUY&autoplay=1

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

YES..we build durable bots..this year we broke eight times

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

We're spoiled by years of flat field games with no obstacles. People have gradually been moving their drivetrains closer and closer to the margins of strength assuming every game would have 4" wheels, simple obstacles, not jumping over things, etc. and this game threw all of that away. As a result, 16T sprockets, 25 chain drives, etc. are failing everywhere and people are saying the game is rough, when really the designs didn't adjust for the rigors of the game.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

None of these three decisions are bad in a vacuum this year, but when it rains, it pours.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Most brutal game I've seen in my 15 years of doing FIRST. The field is breaking robots while robots are breaking the field and now robots are starting to break each other. It's gonna get worse in St. Louis. Alot worse!

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Unfortunate. When we were building our drive train, more than half the team called us "stupid" for spending so much time securing everything and implementing backup systems, (for example if one bolt breaks, there were 3 more supporting it). We were one of the very few bots that didn't break down at either of our events.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Luckily, the only broken parts we had were this gear and a bent piece of 1x1 angle. That being said, this game is brutal to robots. Around the same time we had the bent angle incident, our hex shaft for the intake slipped out of it's collars and bearings after another robot hit us so we drove around for a match with it hanging in the robot.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Our robot got demolished (exadriateing a little) our first comp we broke 5 chains over several matches, one whole side at one point. Our POT mount for our arm broke 2 times, our cam bus got disconnected during a match. our roll cage got rolled up on by another bot in the quarter finals, our orange light mount got completely meshed up. our wheel trusses got bent like crazy, (one was in a 's' shape). our shooter ball guiders got bend ever flipping match, we lost our camera during our semi match (we didn't need it though) and our support bracket that tied our robots frame at the front, got bent so it looked like this ||__|| --> //__\\ or \\__// ( ||,\\, // ) 'are the wheel sides of the robot'

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

The difficulty with this particular game stems more from the fact that teams' institutional memory of games before RR has failed. AA was rougher in robot-to-robot interaction, while Stronghold is rougher in terms of vertical drops and robot-to-field interaction. RR taught new students that FRC robots could be lightly built and survive, which is one of the longer lasting shames about that game.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

And bumpers. There were basically 3 years worth of students on teams who had never had to build a robust bumper. (Let alone compliant with the rules...)

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

This statement confuses me. Surely students who competed in Aerial Assist would have some memory of how to build robust bumpers.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

A one year gap is a lot of time to forget.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

It really is, and plus Aerial Assist simply didn't have that much brute force on either the frame or the bumpers (I've been told). Most of the bumpers I saw falling off, happened when the robot hit a defense the wrong and got stuck.

Tell me, (I wasn't a part of aerial assist) did bumpers fall off often in aerial assist?

The portcullis managed to break the 3/16 polycarbonate rails we intended for it to slide on when our driver hit it at almost full speed. It went up, hit its stops hard and then Newton took over with one of those pesky laws. Snapped the poly right off.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Took a hit so hard at champs in AA that the drive rails on our WCD bowed outwards and all the rivets mounting the drive rails to the bellypan sheared.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I'm not share if this belongs here exactly, and if it doesn't, feel free to let me know, I'm new to chief Delphi- anyways, a few problems that we have had this year:

Generally, the robot is actually holding up pretty well this year- we only had a few problems, and only three of them actually effected our matches

-aluminum rivets on the front of our bot all suffered absolute failures, we replaced them with steel rivets and had no problems(no effect in matches, just a really bouncey electrical board)

- we burned out a CANTalon somehow, (we think that it was a lemon) and it took down our entire CANBus. Fortunately we were on the batter when it happened(we did end up missing a match while we tried to find which component actually burned out, everything still had its lights on so we had to manually test each part)

-A bearing on our climber failed, causing the climber to stop working

-Our robot uses one shaft to rotate itself above the low goal. We use a 3/4" water-hardened steel shaft to do so. We twist it. It actually twists about 60° every 12 matches, when we usually swap a new one in- but for MSC we didn't swap it out at all, and we had no problems with it

- CTRE's 18 gauge ferrels don't properly fit our 18 gauge wire, so we switched to 16 gauge ferrels and crimped them tight... Only problem is that the electronics seem to put too much pressure on them, causing them to break off inside of our Power distribution board, pneumatics control module, and voltage regulator- irreparably. (We lost radio power in a match due to that one)

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Our robot has been roughed up a lot...

-The camera kept falling under our mount at St joe. Fixed by moving it back from the mount.

-The outer walls on our aluminum tubing began bowing out in several spots. Fixed with steel brackets inside tubing.

-The pvc guides for our shooter broke out during a match at St joe... Replaced with aluminum for traverse city

Aluminum piece of customized kit chassis under battery bent after every finals match in st joe... Replaced with steel for traverse city

Hubs for our polycord belts on our intake broke from hitting the low bar. Made a bracket to protect it...

-main shooter backplate began to bend slightly at traverse city and then failed completely when our guides hit the berm at MSC... Replaced with our firmer backup. (But have to lift shooter when crossing berm... Who knew it would be our hardest defense at states?:yikes:)



That's all I can think of right now but we fixed every issue we could and tried to make sure it couldn't happen again. :D

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Finally did a full inspection of our bot today. Apparently some how, somewhere the transmission on the left side completly cracked and one of the 3 motors was dangling loose... I suspect if we had played even one more match, something bad would have happened.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

We used what we called the plow on our robot to have the porticulus slide on. It was made out of 1"×1" with 1/8" wall square aluminum and that still bent and minimum speed. It wasn't major bending but that part of the arm bent roughly 1.5" back by the end of State.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

You should watch some of our matches from 2014 then, I would wager that we had the fastest robot on the field that year. We were almost max weight and nearly all of it was less than a foot off the ground, I don't care if you have good bumpers when a 140 pound robot slams into you at 2% the speed of sound(Yes really) you will feel it. The pool noodles went completely flat in the corners, the maple plywood shattered several times.

This year is still worse though.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

This is the roughest game since 2006 - the last year before bumpers were added.

Robot to robot contact cushioned by bumpers simply isn't that nasty. Negative acceleration over the distance of bumper compression involves less g-force than a robot slamming into an essentially unmovable steel barrier with a portion of their chassis. If you add in the violent landing that occurs - even coming off the chili fries - you have a game that would test any robot.

In addition, I have yet to see a robot to robot interaction foul called this year. In 2014, interaction inside the bumper zone was very frequently flagged. This year it is not flagged, and some tippy defensive robots have spent a good portion of their match time landing on top of other robots.

In 2006, it was possible to have a chassis to chassis interaction of two robots travelling full speed in opposite directions. Robot interaction fouls were rarely called. I would argue those collisions may have had greater forces involved than this year. However, they were rare compared to defensive crossings.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

You haven't been paying attention to chief delphi at all have you :D There have been several several fouls called, and several red cards called as well for robot to robot interaction.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Interesting. It must be as widely varied as the tipping fouls are. There were a couple bots at Michigan Champs who would wheelie when accelerating and then slam down on top of other bots and I never saw a single foul called - even when pieces went flying.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Stronghold is certainly the roughest game in recent memory; I'm not qualified to say anything about the early years. It was clearly the most brutal terrain since Breakaway. IIRC, a Breakaway bot could opt to go under those walls; in Stronghold, there was no (legal) way around (under) the opposing defenses, and crossing most defenses twice was actually a Ranking Point game objective (breaching), and doing many crossings is usually essential to another (capturing the tower). All of the reliable shortcuts and workarounds to robots directly crossing the defenses were plugged by game rules.

I don't recall nearly as many lost bumpers in Aerial Assist. There were massive bumper-to-bumper hits - harder than I've seen in Stronghold. This is because the field had no obstructions except the four corner goals. However, this force usually drove the bumpers INTO the robot; Stronghold has many more cases where bumpers are exposed to high shear forces. This was the first time since Breakaway that bumpers were regularly slamming vertically into field elements. Further, in Aerial Assist, teams mostly tried to lower the bumpers as close to the ground as possible, to make picking up that 24" ball easier. In Stronghold, most bumpers topped out between 11" and 12" to make it easier to get over the defenses (and in many cases the boulder intake is BELOW the bumpers this year).

Between the many angles of collision and the high number of "bumper rookies" there were bound to be a lot of bumpers on the carpet. Even veteran teams were short on bumper tribal knowledge -- our fifth year team had four students who played both Aerial Assist and Stronghold. Two did wiring and two did programming for Aerial Assist - none touched a bumper except to help swap them out while on pit duty. Our bumper knowledge was from mentors. Our returning technical mentors had never dealt directly with bumpers in the past except as something to work around, though we do have a NTM who took part in bumper sewing (though not mechanical construction or mounting) during our early years. Without the preserved wisdom of CD, we would have probably been in the "bumpers on the carpet" crowd.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Thankfully, our team had a parent who made the actual bumpers themselves for ultimate ascent and aerial assist. She was able to use that knowledge and improve upon it to make really robust bumpers (after lone star (our second event) our bumpers were only slightly ripped). And regarding mounting mechanisms, we just decided to go overboard and add mounting points in every free spot on the frame perimeter. With those two things combined thankfully we were a "carpet bumper" team :D .

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

:confused: :( It is because there are so many challenges on just scoring points and playing "legal" defense

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

And that's what makes a good driver and drive coach, being able to make these decisions on the fly.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I would say 2003 is still the worst but most people weren't around for. First 15 seconds all 4 auto robots run full bore straight up a hill and into each other. End of the match is a straight king of the hill match with tons of high speed ramming... all with no bumpers. Robots were alot more solid back then lol.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

In recent years, games with more defense were more destructive... and fun. This game i honestly didn't see much defense, and got kinda bored. And after championships, ill take about all the negatives in my view of the game. Sure, people would break their robot by dukes of hazarding them over the defenses, but thats where the majority of the damage came from. So no, I do not believe this was the roughest game by any means...(In fact, if you look at 2010 and 2012, the robots easily fell off the mounds and teeter and that didn't end well at all, 2013 robots could fall from the top bar on the pyramid and literally end their season. 2014, again a lot of robot on robot action. 2009, static electricity discharge onto the cRio). Thats my opinion anyway.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

I agree that this was not the roughest game ever. 159 has caused some serious robot damage in games that allowed for more speed+defense, enough that (although this might not be true) we look at rules sometimes and say "Oh! that rule exists because of what we did to (insert team # here) in (insert year here)."

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Not sure if it's been the roughest game on the robots of all time, but, as others have alluded to above, taken into account the damage that has also occurred to field elements (balls, original low bar), I think the total carnage produced by this year's game has to be up towards the top of the list. I think the best example of this was at the Suffield Shakedown. Because the event did not end up getting access to an official FIRST field, we were stuck with using wooden defenses for the event. I'm pretty sure that by the end of the day, there were more defenses in the graveyard than there were on the field...

I'd still say that Aerial Assist was a little more violent on the bots than Stronghold. The rules regarding defenses and the inability to use the full length of the field to rev up to full speed before slamming into another robot appeared to have made the potential for damage smaller. At the very lest, this year, it seems like damage that occurs to the robots can be more often attributed to the driver, not the effects of other drivers (not to say that the latter is never the case though).

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Ever since this thread started I've been just waiting for someone to say this – but no one has – so here goes:

Welp, if Stronghold isn't the roughest game yet, it sure has the roughest terrain.

That is all.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

Sorry, no. Breakaway had rougher terrain (both higher and steeper), but it did have an alternative (going under rather than over).

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

While not as great a decision this year as 2010, you could feasibly have designed a robot who could only go through the secret passage* or the low bar.

Edit: I'm gonna pretend this always meant for getting into your own courtyard.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

:(

There was neither "rough"-ness nor "terrain" in Breakaway; therefore, I'll count my pun as still valid. :P

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

The secret passage is only valid for entering and leaving your own courtyard. If my recollection of reading past rules is correct, going under the low bar this year was more restrictive than going under the gaps in 2010, both in terms of maximum robot height and minimum required slope/ground clearance that the robot was required to navigate.

Re: Is Stronghold the roughest game yet?
 

It's a frequency of navigation thing. Many teams didn't cross the bumps 10+ times a match in 2010. Robots tended to stay in zones to play a role.

Add into that the fact that while the bumps in 10 were certainly bigger you could fairly easily design around them. Compare at this year with the variety of defenses.