Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Worth Sports has a PDF that lists all of their products. On page 43 in the upper left hand corner is the product. Suggested list price is $9.99 for 4 softballs. It's interesting to note that on the BOM the softballs are listed as costing $3.50 each. I wonder why there is a discrepancy.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Yup, this is currently how the system is setup. If you just wish to view the forums, you'll need to log out of your FRC account. If you wish to post a question, please register for a new account.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Re: Softballs: Talk to your school softball coaches. Chances are they've got 50 practice softballs laying around that they wouldn't mind sharing.
Re: Game: Since the rules stipulate that a VEX team has at most 10 students, and our FRC team is currently around 30 (up from 11 last year - hooray for word of mouth advertising!), I'm having an in-house competition. Split the teams up into 4 groups, got 4 starter kits (hooray for 1/2 price at RadioShack!) and some crystals, I'm building the field out of PVC and cardboard and a $2 lazy susan from Wal-Mart, and mid-October we'll see who the best robot is.
I know that even our best won't be competitive against a real FVC team (4 motors vs. 10 motors for a start - I'm confining them to one starter kit and the rubber bands, string, etc.) but the students have come up wih designs which will do the necessary tasks using only the starter kit materials. Should be fun.
Great way to introduce the rookie members to the idea of a short build season, designing and building as a team, their own strengths and weaknesses, and of course GP.
Anybody else doing the same?

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

I'm still having trouble designing to fit your requirements...
but I think I have just figured out how to get it an extra 6 inches above the bar... but i still have to see if it will be able to pull itself up, and it only picks up one ball at a time so it wont be as good as my last design on scoring... maybe i can figure it out, but then again maybe not

"I can always use a hammer to beat some extra size out of it" khutchtumur bum-erdene 2006

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

We do something similar each fall (even before the Vex kits), but with our own custom, simple games. Last year (the first with the Vex kits) we had the students group up and build squarebots with manipulators (primarily plows) and push ping pong balls and dixie cups around a field into their end zones (bonus points if they got the balls into the cups, in their end zones, and even more if the balls were in a cup standing up). Relatively simple, and only really took a meeting and half to build and compete. This year we will be doing something similar again, but will be allowing teams to be a bit more adventurous (although they could still build square bots if they wished) and will be making the game a bit more complex.
Before the vex kit, we used modified drills and plywood, and some scrap material and model car/boat parts to make the minibots.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Has anyone out there found a good mail order source (ordered via telephone or internet) for bulk delivery (50-ish quantities) of the YWCS11 model Worth Softball that is the official game piece for Hangin' Around?

Using Google a few night ago I searched high and low and came up empty.

Blake
PS: Yes - I do want exactly that model in factory-fresh condition.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Not to change the subject but...

In section 3.4.2 of the rule book it discusses rankings. Your rank points will be equal to the losing teams score. This is good and bad both. If you are the losing team hopefully you won get totally owned. But for all of you guys planning to build a Vex equivalent of The 25 robot(myself included) it looks like you may have to score for your opponents to keep your ranking points high. That also shoots down the idea of descoring you opponents balls in qualifying(which is totally legal if you don't care about your ranking points).

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

The way I see it, ranking points worries brought on by de-scoring are relatively insignificant. RPs are the second form of ranking, after your WLT record. Unless there are several undefeated or one-loss teams at your event, odds are that a de-scoring strategy won't make the difference between you picking or not picking. But even if you aren't picking, I believe that a competent de-scoring robot will find a home on an alliance somewhere, particularly if they can convert those balls into points for their own alliance. In the absence of that, my pick list would look for some sort of platform, bar, or Atlas ball control.

Unless you're in a round against a pair of flowerpots (read: non-moving robots), I wouldn't worry about it.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

I can't wait To see Lavery's face when he realizes I have no idea what I want the robot to do.
I do like the fact, that we get a larger size limitation than last year, 10 motors es muy bien, Mm I can just think up ideas now...

Oh and I love the whole Drinking straw+construction paper= flag :D

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Does anyone know what type of ball the Atlas ball is exactly? And where to procure one besides VexLabs (which doesn't have them on sale yet)? They're supposed to go on sale soon, but I figure the sooner our team can get our hands on one the better.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

It's supposedly identical to the 2004 FRC Doubler Balls, if you can get your hands on one of those (which was a 36" rubber inflatable ball, inflated to 30"). Otherwise, pretty much any 30" rubber inflatable ball should be close enough for most applications.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Look into finding a few FRC teams in your area that have been around for a while. I know my FRC team has about 6 of these balls still hanging around from that year as we were originally going to deal with the doubler ball and later decided not to, so they were never used until now for our FVC team.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

Are there any penalty points to be incurred in this game? I've looked through the rule book and see nothing but powerdowns and DQs.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

I did a reread of the manual, and you're right--the only penalties there are disables and DQs. It makes sense, though, since last season's game didn't need penalties, either. In Championship-level play last year, we had only one case where there was even a hint of a question as to whether a team had an entanglement issue, and that's about all the refs had to figure out. Past that, our task was largely score tabulation; the game was settled on the field. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: Hangin'-A-Round -- Official Game Discussion
 

When designing this year's game the FVC GDC developed a game mandate. This described what we wanted in a game, based on discussions we had as to "what makes a good game?". Some of our top priorities were to have a game that was:
- Easy to understand --> easy to score by the audience
- Smooth game play
- Not be referee intensive

So in accord with this mandate we decided that penalty points were something that should be avoided. We decided to let the scoring tasks and methods dictate the flow and strategies of the game, as opposed to penalty flags. We feel that this provides a much better experience for all involved, teams, spectators and volunteers.