Quote:
Originally Posted by Nemo
Our first regional is Kansas City. If we don't do a level 3 climber, I think we'll show up and see that 1625/1730/1986/etc have brought their L3 climbers that also shoot frisbees. If they do, good luck winning with a 10 point hanger.
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Excuse a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to address this line of thought. This isn't meant to be an attack on you so much as it is a counter to a really pervasive idea in FIRST Robotics.
This is really the wrong way to think about this problem. It is oh-so-tempting to get into the "If they do it, we need to as well, or we are automatically worse than them" mentality. I only know this because my teams / I have done it time and time again before.
First - you are never playing a 1v1 match. Yes, it's great if you can go frisbee for frisbee with the big guns, but as long as you have alliance partners you will be able to rely on those partners to achieve the tasks which you can't do.
Second - if you throw 5 weeks into a 30 point hanger because "team X will do a 30 point hang AND shoot frisbees", and you don't use it, that's
hundreds of man-hours you could have put into your shooter, your intake, or into drive practice in order to get your scoring rate up at or above their level! The jack of all trades really is the master of none for this game more than many others. And if 1625 matches you frisbee for frisbee and can 30 point hang: assemble a better alliance and the match is still in question. Three specialized robots will often beat one multi-function robot and two supporters.
As anyone who has spent way too much time on the thirty point hang will tell you, getting a solid design that gets you up the tower is a massive undertaking. Every other feature of your robot will be potentially compromised to make this happen.
I honestly think the above debate this year is mostly academic - fears of your local elite team being able to "do everything well" this year are going to be unfounded. The best frisbee shooters (in terms of scoring rate across the entire match) will not be teams that have reliable, working fast 30 point hangers. I predict there will be less than a dozen teams that can 30 point hang efficiently while being even 90% as effective as the top-tier frisbee scorers.