[mathking]

On the 2011 game: If the referee determines that you are intentionally trying to damage the internal workings of another robot you can still get a red card directly. What this update does is give the referee some discretion if, for example, you tip over onto another robot and damage it.

2005 remembered: In Pittsburgh that year there was a case when a robot (I think it was 128) initiated (unintentionally) contact with another robot which as a result damaged the first robot. The second robot got disqualified. This update gives a referee some wiggle room to prevent that from happening.

2004 (FIRST Frenzy) remembered purely for nostalgia's sake: This game was pretty rough too. At least partly because so many of the collisions happened while one or more robots were suspended several feet off of the ground. In one match while we were winching up another robot drove on top of us (they were trying to push us away from the bar, not to drive on top of us, but didn't realize that once we had deployed our hook we were not going anywhere) from the top level of the platform. We didn't retract our overly massive arm for fear of breaking their much smaller arm which was entangled with them. But we need to get off the ground to win the match, so after waiting about 10 seconds for them to get off, we tried to winch up to get them to slide off. But their robot was stuck on ours. Our winch lifted the two robots up off the ground, but we were not in balance so we swung violently to the side, hit a third robot and knocked it off the bar to fall on a fourth robot. (In the end, we didn't win either because our robot was swinging back and forth and at the apex of the swing the edge of our ball grabber would brush the platform, so no points for hanging.)