My personal feeling is that building a second bot is possibly a crude advantage to certain teams. It is, for the most part, a flaunting of funds and not much more.
Quote:
|
RebAl: Just keep in mind the technically the rules prohibit you from developing anything while your robot is shipped
|
Although this can't be regulated past large objects being smuggled in, such as a claw, arm, etc. (Even though more than a few teams have done this in the past). The main two things that having a second bot gives the advantage for is programming and drive practice. Neither can be regulated because they can't disallow new programs to be entered post-ship.
If you are to build a program off a clone-bot then TECHNICALLY you would be cheating, although I don't think most teams would construe it as such, and neither would I.
As I said earlier, building a secondary bot is mostly a flaunting of your team's excess funds. I think those funds and effort could be put to a better use than a second bot. Such as maybe buying materials and building a field for a rookie team or one that may have lost a sponsor.
FIRST, and many teams, are at a low-point in funds. I closely parallel this to small businesses starting up. They need to buy products from other companies to start turning a profit with their own products. Which in turn makes for better competition in the marketplace, which often leads to collaborations of ideas all the way down to more efficiant, better products by both companies.
I hope no team in FIRST
wants to blow everyone out of the water, do it themselves, and win Nationals without any alliance partners, just because they can. I hope they want to promote all that the chairman's award stands for.
If your team has money to blow, rather than build yourselves a new bot, I think building a field or buying field parts for another team which can barely afford to build one bot.
Personal experience, another team donated approximently $500 to 4 or 5 other teams, that money was used to pay for our field materials so we could make a full-size field to practice on. Before we had that money we were contemplating on building a partial field or none at all.
In the end, my suggestion is that having friends is better than perfecting your bot for beating teams. If you still got a lot of cash to blow, maybe build a chassis to give your drivers some stuff to practice with.
[note] These are my beliefs and not necessarily that of members of 470, 470 itself, or my old team 247