[ttldomination]

So there are many stories of success, but I will write of a story of mild failure. Failure is subjective in its nature, so perhaps some may not agree with my assessment of things.

Constraints

We started out the season knowing that we would have to do a shooter, and we were facing a task that no one on the team had any experience with. Our initial goals were simply consistency and distance. Although some of us recognized factors such as spin-up, speed loss, and physical space, we never formally declared any expectations for those.

Now, in our region, the turrented-hood shooter of 1771 are a thing of legend, so in the back of my mind, I know that we would be going down that route. However, we never imposed any assumptions and wanted to go through the full development cycle.

Prototypes

Our first proposed idea was the two-axled shooter. The development and prototypting of this stage took roughly two weeks, but we learned a lot about ball compression, compression vs. distance shot, and variance in the shot vs. how the ball was fed in.

This is when the imaginary feces hit the figurative fan. After playing around with the design for two weeks, the team was ready to move on.

However, moving on proved a little bit more tasking than initially thought. Student leaders had prepared for and were ready to create a hood design. They had rough dimensions that would help them prototype a design, but this proved time intensive. On the other hand, a smaller team consisting of one mentor and a couple of students created a prototype of their own. This prototype used one 8" wheel, went through roughly 150 degrees of compression, and the compression was roughly 4" at its most compressed.

The latter design proved popular among most of the team, due to the fact that it worked. It appeared to achieve our initial goals which appealed to the mentors, however, a handful of students were still adamant on testing their single axle shooter.

Final Result

As week 4ish was wrapping up and work on the other systems was wrapping up, we were forced to make a decision, and the decision was made to scrap the momentum-less hood design and assume the larger shooter as our primary shooter.

Our final product was similiar however, we made some swaps to help with consistency.
- We swapped to an eight inch colson wheel to help with slow down after shots.
- We used aluminum ball guides and tracks to make sure they were consistent and light.
- ~4" of compression.
- ~150 degrees of carry.

Further testing and prototyping revealed that the secondary shooter characteristics which we considered non-critical ended up being our achilles heel. The shooter ended up too big, took too long to spin up, and slowed down too much between shots. At the end of the day, even our consistency was shotty as we saw variation in almost every direction.

All in all, our shooter was a major choke-hold in our robot (among other things). We wanted to go through each option and prototype each design, but that ultimately fell apart. A smarter allocation of resources and man power would have helped this. Also, a more head-strong approach to assemble proven designs (single axle shooters) would've also helped.

In the end, we ended up doing ok. While we were reduced to two point shots at the Peachtree Regional, we managed to pull off a win with a lot of luck and a lot of help.

- Sunny G.