[Jon Stratis]

Teams are allowed to make changes... otherwise you would have a lot more teams with issues than the few that have added blockers during the competition.

Further, any inspection supersedes any previous inspection. If a team builds a blocker to add to their robot on Friday, they are no longer legal, until they get reinspected. At the point of that reinspection, all mechanisms that are and were a part of that robot are required to be present. If you're sitting right at 120lbs, you can't remove a 30lb shooter in order to add a 10lb blocker - both the shooter and the blocker would be included as part of the overall weight. However, if you were under 120lbs, and could add the shooter without taking anything off, how is this different (from the point of view of the rules) from a team modifying their shooter to make it more accurate? The rules don't say anything about robot capabilities, or intended use of mechanisms, or anything like that.

In my mind, the grey area here is when a team is right at the weight limit and makes a change that includes removing something and adding something else. What happens when the team disassembles the old mechanism and uses the parts to construct the new one? Is this a swappable mechanism at this point, or is this a permanent change? What happens if a team spends an hour swiss-cheesing their robot in order to drop enough weight to add something to their shooter to make it more accurate? Do we need to collect all the metal shavings and weigh them with the robot too?

These are just some examples where teams can really try to lawyer the rules, instead of looking at the intent of the rules.

The intent of T08 is to ensure that robots designed with swappable mechanisms follow strict weight rules. It's not intended to prevent teams from making modifications to their robot.