[EricH]

Originally Posted by AlexH

what's the legality of building a first spec robot in the off season and entering independent of your team?

As noted, that's up to the competition organizers in the offseason. (For the regular season, I can think of a couple of rules that would prohibit this.)

Originally Posted by JaneYoung

Another couple of naive questions:

If something breaks on the loaner practice 'bot during the competition or in the hands of the team that is borrowing it - what happens?

Does the team who owns the robot, help with mentoring/repairing/replacing? Does GP work like it would normally, and anyone who can help, helps? If something is broken and can not be repaired or replaced, does the loaner team basically suck it up? No hard feelings because they know what can result from loaning the practice 'bot out?

That's something to be worked out before the event between the teams. I would hope that there's a massive multi-team mentoring repair group in that pit, though. If something was broken beyond at-event repair, that should also be discussed beforehand; however, if I were on the loaning team, I would call it a "well, at least it didn't do that to us in eliminations" experience and invite the team the robot was loaned to over for a session of identifying and solving the failure point.