[Bethie42]

Originally Posted by little.goetz

Agreed. There were times when our robot stopped driving because we didn't use a locknut where we should've.

You know, I still have data on the time your robot wasn't working...your last match, it looks like?....nothing like 'ded' scrawled on a scout's reporting sheet

But I sympathize. It's always sad when the robot is dead throughout the match because of a loose wire....I remember running around after that match last year, telling other teams that yes, we're fine, we just had a loose wire! And we were ranked #1 earlier today!
Speaking of which...does anyone count, at all, on the 'official' reported rankings? We don't use them much, except when we're ranked high and want to broadcast and/or record the fact. I guess they might be useful as a predictor of top-seeded teams.

Regarding pit scouting: we've always had a small scouting team and so we focus on match scouting [although I favor spending my lunch pit-scouting]. If we have enough people this year, we may do some this year though.
I appreciated the suggestions in this thread to ask about a team's strategy, that will figure in. I've never seen the need to ask about a team's drivetrain, personally.
I'd like to know at which level they prefer to hang game pieces. That could be recorded in match-scouting, but it would be very helpful to know before a game [particularly for partners].
Can their tube-manipulator pick up game pieces off the ground? At one point we considered only receiving tubes from a human player [we scratched that idea, fortunately]. If the Week 0 event we attended was any judge, it will be far faster to pick tubes up off the ground than from a human player.

Personally, I don't think feeder robots will be big this year, because it IS just so easy for a human player to throw a game piece out onto the field. Of course, our Week 0 event was not very competitive and the human players just chucked all their game pieces onto the field and then watched the matches....so there may be more of a shortage of game pieces in competition. I guess we'll know this weekend

To get a bit off-topic....defense is important, especially in this game with the above-mentioned small scoring area. Any ideas on an objective way to rank defensive teams? little.goetz, our scouting report on your team from last year only indicates the number of balls scored and the fact that your robot was dead in one match. This is because I've always found it hard to qualify defensive robots [Oh that team just scored a point, that one didn't, guess who gets noticed?]. If we'd been able to notice and record that you guys were good at defense, it would have been better for all concerned. With a larger team, I have high hopes this year....do you guys rely on number of game pieces blocked, for example, or some more-subjective rating, such as a 1-5 scale?