I'd be willing to help out. Over the past 6 seasons, our team has gone through just about every extreme in prototyping. Our rookie year, we didn't do any prototyping. Our second year, one of the mentors built a working prototype in his personal woodshop overnight for the team, after which we decided to go with that design. Our third year, we spent about half the build season working with the students to prototype different solutions, really focusing on the process... in the end, though, I don't think the prototypes helped us make any decisions. Our fourth year, we got quicker at it, and were able to base at least one decision on the results of the prototypes. Our fifth year, we basically made up our minds ahead of time, and then built a prototypes to prove the design. This year, we really hit our stride best, and and came up with a bunch of different prototypes over the course of a week, and used those results to determine our design. It applied to every aspect of the robot.
So, lets get to your questions, and then I'll expand on it until you decide to stop listening to me
