[pfreivald]

I read the title of this thread as "Practice bot mortality" and thought, "yeah, heh, we beat the crap out of ours, too!"

If NCS can build practice bots, any team can. "Fair" is a four-letter eff-word; it belongs neither in school nor in your brain. It's fine to think, "Holy crap, there's no way we can beat the Thunder Chickens/Simbotics/Wildstang/Poofs/[insert so many other teams here]", as long as it's followed up by, "but we're sure as heck going to try!"

With FIRST, it's not "put up or shut up" like in sports... it's "put up and shut up". Don't brag, don't complain, don't whine, for GP's sake don't talk smack -- just do the best darned job you possibly can, every single time. Don't settle, and get better every week and every year. Talk to Paul Copioli if you really want to get inspired about what and how a team can go from zero to intimidating, state-of-the-art FIRST monsters through sheer effort, drive, and smarts. Legacy teams didn't become legacy teams through luck, and they sure as heck don't *stay* legacy teams through complacency and some kind of unfair advantage.

1551 isn't a FIRST powerhouse. I'm not even sure we aspire to be a powerhouse -- we just aspire to be better than we were last year, by as much as we can possibly manage given our resources. But I can assure you that we don't waste one synapse-fire on wondering whether or not what other teams are doing is fair, right, moral, ethical, or just. FIRST isn't about beating the other teams, it's about beating yourself. If you happen to get the occasional blue banner in the process, that's pretty cool, too.

To whit, if your practice bot can't be the same as your regular bot due to money or other limitations, make it close enough -- plywood instead of aluminum, toughboxes instead of planetaries, regular mecanum instead of octocanum... ...and for God's sake don't wait until your regular robot is done to build it -- wham-bang it together as fast as you can and give the protobot to your programmers as a test bench, then replace mechanisms with whatever's closer to "real" if/when you can.

Can't manage even that this year? Then focus on one or two mechanisms. Build 'em, refine 'em, and when you get to competition use your 30 lbs to replace 'em... And do that practice bot next year.

A healthy mind has no place for envy.