Re: Tipping opponents robots
 

Like I said, it never happened to us. Right off the bat, it's pretty plain to see that I'm not complaining about what happened to our team. We were thrilled with our performance at the regional, and it was great to have competition, but what I heard some other teams talking about and what I saw some other teams doing slightly disturbed me.
It sounds to me like you read neither my post nor the manual. I'm not sure how many times I will have to say that this never happened to my team. For the rule you requested: <G36> ROBOT to ROBOT Interaction - Strategies aimed solely at the destruction, damage, tipping over, or entanglement of ROBOTS are not in the spirit of the FRC and are not allowed. Violation: YELLOW CARD

Defending robots didn't tip another robot once in the competition. Some, however, were discussing (and executing) the strategy of stuffing offensive robots into goals. When an offensive robot is in the goal, and the ball has already been herded in, ramming them from behind is obviously not aimed at being defensive via blocking them; it's aimed at entanglement. Clearly a yellow card, which was never called at the Hawaii regional despite the fact that it happened several times.

Just like Vikesrock said to me: if you know that your post will offend someone enough to act on this by saying "I don't mean to offend you", don't post it. I don't appreciate messages from people who misrepresent what I say, nor do I appreciate messages from people who attempt to insult the level of maturity or the building skill of another poster. Like I said: none of this ever happened to us. Apparently it is inconceivable to some people here that a team could act not out of petty self-interest but out of concern for other teams.

I'm sorry for the ambiguity in my post; I both knew and meant to convey that you guys played offense.
After reexamining the rules, it comes down to a matter of judgment of intent. If you deliberately try to take out the opposing alliance's defense by playing rough with them, then you are definitely deserving of a penalty from <G36>. On the other hand, if you concentrate only on scoring and ignore whatever happens to an opposing robot, then while I am not a huge supporter of the strategy I admit freely that it is completely legal. However, the fact that this happened to nearly every single team who opposed you, in my mind, called into doubt your intent--could almost every single team being disabled have been a coincidence? However, if you say that you never intentionally disabled, flipped, damaged, or stuffed into a goal, and that these events were simply unfortunate side effects of your trying to score, then I will take your word for it. I hereby retract my questioning of your strategy.
It's kind of ironic that you should bring up soccer at this point in the discussion, because "studying the game of soccer" is one of the big reasons I question playing rough. Take this example: A striker takes a ball and tries to score it in a goal, and an opposing team's weak defender gets in his way. Rather than going around the defender, the striker simply pushes the defender into the side of the goal so hard that the defender breaks several bones, and then he scores. Would a penalty be called? I think so. Injuring another player in soccer by playing aggressively is a red card, no matter how pathetic the defender's training regimen was. In soccer, when the judges see such behavior, they do call a penalty every time. But Breakaway is not soccer, and therein lies my error.

To put it in concise terms, I basically agree with Mr. Skierkiewicz. Pushing offensive robots into the goals while playing defense is blatantly against <G36>. Pushing defensive robots into goals while you are playing offense is legal (if slightly against the spirit of gracious professionalism and "coopertition"). Like he said, I want to lose to a team that legitimately had a better robot/strategy/driving (e.g. teams 368 and 359) than me, not a team that just disabled my alliance partners via stuffing them into goals.

Re: Tipping opponents robots
 

I am going to make this one last post on the topic and leave it as that.

Sounds to me that you still question our intentions in terms of scoring with defense on us. I will reiterate again.
Our job as striker is to score balls. While it seems like robots on multiple occasions get pushed around by us, lets remember that the "defensive" robot is the one initiating the contact and we are simply trying to push/shoot balls into goals. We have successfully many times pushed balls into goals even though a robot stood in the way between the ball and goal. It seems to occur often because its often that teams try to block goals sideways while we attempt to score.
Outmaneuvering another robot isnt the only way to play the game to score. If that was the case, you might as well call this flag football and have rules for no contact. Heck, why even have bumpers then? You have exagerrated the facts by saying that these events occured for nearly every opponent that we played against.

We have broken an arm brace, 2 spots on our frame perimeter, 5 plaction wheels, a broken roller ball magnet and multiple air tanks broken off due to the "aggresive" defensive play by teams over 3 tournaments.
I havent complained at all because its part of the game, its not illegal, and we dont feel that any team has intentionally tried to hurt our robot at all (other than robots hitting us while climbing for the end game-which is a clear violation of the rules). After doing this the last 11 years, I have learned that building a robust robot is very important in addition to form and function.

Play within the rules, make sure you have a solid, robust robot and strategize to win your matches with your teammates. That is my only concern when coaching our alliance everytime we are on the field. I think we more than demonstrated that throughout the course of 3 tournaments. If your sleeping at night, then you havent strategized over and over in your head, more than us........4 weeks and counting. I believe that it is the main reason we have been successful this season, and not because we have to "take out" the defender.

Re: Tipping opponents robots
 

In the past MORT has been targeted by other teams to pin, harass, gang up on, the whole deal. One year, I don't remember how long ago, we made a wedge-bot where any robot that would ram us would flip themselves over because they would drive right on top of us and lose control. Any time a robot was flipped because of this however, we would be penalized. I understand that in this game the field itself flips many robots but getting flipped by someone with a strong drive train, intentionally or unintentionally would fall in this same category as what happened to us. I am surprised there are not more penalties given because of flipping as it is against the spirit of FIRST.

Re: Tipping opponents robots
 

I have a problem with this statement. In the game description this year they talked about the necessity for building robust robots that either would not flip or could self right. The GDC told every team that robot interactions this year could flip robots particularly with high center of gravity. Teams still decided to build robots that would flip with contact and even worse not have any type of self righting device. As a team who has built an absolute tank of a robot that has a very very small chance of flipping I find the idea of penalizing us for simply building a robot to the GDC's suggestions appalling. I agree if we go out looking to flip robots then a penalty should be called. However, if we are being defended against and someone flips as a consequence I dont see how we can be penalized.

As the coach, I tell our driver to avoid contact if at all possible as you arent scoring if you are pushing. Even with us avoiding contact we still managed to flip robots with higher center of gravity. Now we weren't doing anything malicious to flip them so I fail to see how this could be a penalized encounter.

I think lately especially, that GP has been perverted and used as a way to criticize teams that simply are building strong robots as encouraged by the GDC or taking advantage of rules that everyone was given to play by. It is not un-GP to maximize your scoring potential by building a strong low robot to avoid being flipped. Having a tippy robot this year should be motivation to perhaps pay more attention to the GDC and build more robust designs not to criticize teams for being un-GP

Re: Tipping opponents robots
 

It seems like there's a lot of discussion about aggressive play by scoring robots against defensive robots while trying to score.

In years past where I chose to take the defensive role, I never got angry towards the team I was defending if they "hit back" so to say. If you're trying to shut down an offensive machine through defense they have every right to react to your defense so they can score. I've yet to see a team this year purposely interact with a defending robot in an illegal way while trying to score, but I have seen solely defensive teams attempt to tip, and otherwise immobilize good offensive machines.

IMO it's just like self-defense, if you push someone then you better expect them to push back.

Agreed.

Re: Tipping opponents robots
 

Oh I had never said I was for or against it. I was just saying that with all of the speeches about Gracious Professionalism and such, it is taken so lightly that robots are being toppled which often enough costs the unlucky robot the match and their dignity. I was using MORT's past as an example of how FIRST strives to uphold Gracious Professionalism.

Personally I think if it was unintentional, there should be no penalty. However, I would also think that the head ref of such a prestigious organization would have a different view on the matter.