Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Matteson
Our team frequently discusses the failure that we had as rookies in 1995 that lead to a judges award called "Best Execution of an Alternative (Losing) Strategy". This was given to us because we created an overly complicated catapult to launch the ball through the uprights that formed the goal, the crowd cheered every time they saw us score and people loved the design. The problem was is was not a fast or effective way to score. The best way to score that year was to quickly swing the ball back and forth through the uprights. We had that idea but got so wrapped around the axel thinking that method was easy to defend that we spent all build making an undefendable scorer that took half the match to reset.
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That
sounds familiar. We cheered after every hurdle... not because we scored 8 points, but because the retracting lift meant we hadn't stripped another planetary...
On a related thought, I wonder what the maximum sustainable number of "winning" FRC teams is. It is one thing to support an FRC team, we've seen that 2,000 or so and growing can be adequately supported simultaneously. It is quite another thing to sustain an FRC team competing/designing at the level of say Team IFI. In a town with one machine shop, they can't have an 8 hour turnaround for everyone...
Even if a team isn't top tier, I think there's a big difference in resources consumed for a basic rookie team with little engineering support and a consistent top 8 team. It's a much larger drain, and I wonder if that tipping point (the community can't support all of their teams at the level they could otherwise compete at) has been reached in some areas with a high density of teams.