Turret or No Turret?
 

personally we are not going with a turret so that means we have to score triple the robots that can shoot into the center goals. The reason for this is it is our sophomore year in robotics and the gun is a little out of our league as of yet.

ours is going to be more of a dump truck

Re: Turret or No Turret?
 

Yeah that is what we are doing to. It is also our second year.

Re: Turret or No Turret?
 

You don't have to have a turret to have a shooter. Just makes things more flexible come competition (assuming that your turret doesn't fail...). You can just turn the robot towards the goal.

Re: Turret or No Turret?
 

On one hand, your team is to be commended for recognizing the technical limits of design and construction that you have. Building a robot that performs a simple function, but does it well, is FAR better than building a more complex robot that doesn't work well.

On the other hand, you need to think of the disadvantages this brings, and figure out ways around them. For example, if a defensive robot just sits in front of the goal, you are effectively prevented from scoring. The solution? Get there first. Be fast.

Also consider how you might become more valuable on defense. And having the ability to get up on your platform at the end. And being a defensive bot for autonomous by getting in the other alliance's way. And being able to push just about any robot (gently, of course) such that it can't get off a shot. And...

Good luck!

Don

Re: Turret or No Turret?
 

If you use a turret, don't be afraid to beef it up. Team 45 found that out in 04. Our turret was poorly "beefed" in our arm turret for the 2X balls. Last year, we took what we learned from 04 and made a very beefy looking turret that had almost no breaks during the year. Don't let big beefy gears look intimidating, remember, WEIGHT REDUCTION, thats what we did on ours last year. A pic of the 2005 turret can be found here. Right now I don't have a pic of the 04 turret. I will try to get one up sometime.

Re: Turret or No Turret?
 

thanks we are still going to be an offensive team but we have a little secret about our bot that we hope will be a good scoring mechanism.

also by turret i mean anything that will shoot or throw a ball