[timytamy]

The costs involved with long-distance travel to events are not insignificant, our team would struggle to stay within the budget to attend just one regional, and it would be impossible to attend more than one event (regional + championships).

Travel being the obvious one, there are still numerous complications that need to be addressed:

How about exchange rates? Is this in USD? If so which exchange rate do you use? Time of transaction? Time of exchange? Kick-of? Bag'n'Tag?

Operating costs for us are also much larger. Postage and generally higher prices in Australia can't be discounted, and mean that for us to build an equivalent robot to a mainland team we need a significantly larger budget.

What about other expenses? Our team attends and runs a number of out-reach events, including an off-season that teams who can not afford to travel to a regional attend. Limiting our budget would force us to chose between running this event, and running our team. In this case limiting our budget would not only hamper our robot and team, but also our efforts to spread STEM and FIRST in Australia.

It's clear that in many ways, a team budget would not help even the playing field. FIRST teams are about so much more than the robot, to limit the TEAM because of robots is unfair, and would do far more harm than good.

Finally, in a discussion about budgets it's important not to forget the sponsors, sponsors put resources into this program because they see the value of it, and for that my tea and myself are extremely grateful. But how do you explain to a sponsor that sees something they want to support and grow, that they can't?