Crushing Balls?
 

If we crushed the moon rocks with out trying do you think it would count againist us since it is part of the arena??

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

yes damaging field elements is illegal.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

If you slam into the wall at 20fps, a ball rolls in between just in time, and the result is a pile of plastic and spandex, odds are that it will be considered incidental. However, if there is something particular about your robot design that is conducive to regularly destroying game pieces, odds are that you won't be allowed back on the field until you fix it.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

Intentionally destroying field elements is illegal. In 06 we got a poof ball stuck in our drive. The ball got ripped up pretty bad, there is a picture of it somewhere on cd. We did not recieve a penalty because it was not our intention to destroy the ball.

Joey

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

The real question is how many balls will be replaced at comp? 200 plus balls per comp. Just my thought.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

Couldn't tell ya, but they're always well-prepared. Were you around the year we had to stack plastic boxes? They had MOUNTAINS of them for every competition, because they tended to shatter in epic ways. xD

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

Ouch, yes. I helped pop-rivet some of those darn things in Houston... Galileo had a pile of ready-to-go ones with about 2 LARGE PALLETS of unassembled ones behind the curtain.

Or how about 2007's tubes? Boxes and boxes were there, ready to be inflated. The same in 2008. You may not see the piles of spare game pieces, but I can vouch for it that the last two years, they had a field cart dedicated to the game pieces for any event that field went to.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

If you're destroying game pieces left and right, you're doin' it wrong. There's probably a much more effective way to do the task at hand that doesn't break game pieces. Orbit Balls are pretty hardy.

Our rookie year (2004) all of the game pieces were inflatable, and we popped one (or two :o). Each time we got a talking to, and we worked really hard to fix the issue. If your mechanism goes crazy and eats a ball over the course of a regional, no biggie. But if the referees are consistently pulling plastic shards out of their hair when your robot drives by, they'll take issue.

So, if "without trying" means once in a blue moon, the referees are human too (except Benji Ambrogi, he's some sort of superhuman) and they realize this stuff happens. But if the mechanism destroys a ball regularly, you'll have to change it.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

Basically, this is all there is to it. This embodies everything.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

I didn't realize the shear amount of tubes they had until during the ceremony in 2007 they announced that the tubes were being handed out first come first serve, people were crawling over themselves to get large amounts. Some people walked out from behind the curtain like the Michelin Man.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

I respectfully disagree. These balls are completely shoddy. They break within minutes of normal usage (ie: human players throwing them into goals). Half of them broke before they even left Walmart's shelves.

They are anything but hardy, and I would expect every robot to break at least one every match just by running into them.

If your manipulator is destroying them, that's another story, but it seems like it can be all but guaranteed there are going to be a lot of broken balls on the field at any given time.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

From the sounds of it FIRST is going to need a team of Orbit ball repair volunteers to keep enough balls alive. these things are going to get wrecked when robots slide into walls and there happens to be a couple balls in the way, I know we don't have any that haven't already broken.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

Our experience differs. A couple of our balls started out with a separated connector, but none that I know of have broken. This is after many sessions of target practice and a few games of catch with a very young and energetic child.

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

I concur...to an extent. After we used staples and super glue to repair them after our dodgeball game, they've been great since! Now if only the shooter didn't try to rip the cloth off of them :ahh: . We're working on it ...

Re: Crushing Balls?
 

Many of ours have broken and I have found that it may depend on how they are thrown to an extent. It seems that the overhand "tomahawk" or "baseball" throw tends to break them more frequently than a basketball style shot or an underhand toss.