[JesseK]

John, imagine a scenario:

You're President of a business you started years ago. You've worked months on a proposal in competition with other companies for a complex job. You show up to ask questions about submissions in a public forum where (through logical interpretations of even the cleverest wordsmithing) you've discerned some details of your competitors' submissions. However, all it revealed was that your approach to the problem was completely inadequate. What do you do?

Given the chance for improvements, I doubt you'd stay the course. After all, the morale of your employees and reputation of your company is at stake. Sure, I would be quite offended if I had a novel [insert FRC design here] mechanism that was cloned in the same season by a team I may later face; yet being a mentor you too can learn a significant lesson from this.

The rest of this is an anecdote that's merely here to say that I think there's a fine line between believing a team 'simply created a clone' versus the team 'changing course in some core aspects of the design'. When I say "you" I mean the generalized team who has a 1.5s minibot using DD shafts that weighs next to nothing.

Do you expect credit for the entire minibot, certain aspects of the minibot, what? I wasn't 'inspired' by any of the minibots seen here on CD or in web casts; I was simply proven to have made a wrong decision along the way. We visited the idea of direct-drive minibots briefly early in the season, yet shied away from it because we had to make a decision (due to scheduling and snow) before we were able to test all options. The test would have been to see whether or not the drive shaft could have made it through constant shocks while being only cantilevered. So instead we went with a more conservative, modified-gearbox design. It's heavier overall (4.0 lbs) yet has many aspects that are similar to minibots seen in videos and even the "one-day minibot" posted on CD.

If anything, these latest designs will have us revisit the minibot design after DC should we make it to Championships in order to iterate through the direct-drive options. But to say we "cloned the powerhouse teams" would be to completely discredit us, and everything we figured out on our own other than direct-drive shafts and their placement. These things include magnet placement, center of gravity placement, secure attachment to the deployment mechanisms for match play, quick releasing for deployment, etc. This specific anecdote is almost as bad as someone saying a powerhouse team is "mostly mentor built" -- it's simply not factual to paint such a broad stroke.