This thread has been an eye opener for me on many levels. It has been a little peek into the student work ethic, mentor work ethic and resources necessary for a team to transition from "really good" to "elite".
I, frankly, don't expect the rules concerning the length of the build season to change. What has been interesting to me is how the proposed solutions to provide breathing room exclusively focus on somehow extending the end of the build season. Thinking "out of the box", what about making a few tiny rule changes that would allow teams to begin sooner, rather than ending later? Now, I can just hear the chorus of, "We can't build a robot without knowing the game rules!" But, that simply isn't true.
Let me ask some questions. Would your team design and build a drive train (including bumpers) before the game rules were released, if it were legal to start building on, say, the first weekend in December? Could you be creative enough to build one which could be adapted to the game, whatever it ended up being? Would the rewards of doing so be worth the risk that it might not be perfect for the game and it might need to be modified? What rules would need to be changed for this to be legal?
Our team had a near disaster in 2012 because we didn't have enough mechanical mentors to divide between student subteams. We didn't have a functional drivetrain until week 5.5, and it nearly killed us. After the season, we devoted the summer to looking at this problem. The solution we came up with was to develop a drivetrain made as nearly as possible with COTS components. Under the current rules, COTS components can be purchased before the season starts. Our students practiced assembling, wiring and programming the 2012 summer drivetrain so they knew exactly how to build another one when it was legal to do so. We even worked with vendors so that certain necessary components, which would have been custom, were added to their COTS product line, and thus legal to pre-buy. On kickoff day, we were ready to go, and only needed to fabricate 4 axles from hex stock and some shaft spacers. All the rest of the drivetrain parts were COTS parts which we had pre-purchased.
Now, the new size rules threw a monkey wrench into our plans, but we were expecting that SOMETHING would have to be tweaked. So, we had our competition drive train running in two weeks instead of one. No big deal. No stress. No burnout. The drivetrain was mostly assembled and wired by rookie students who learned their skills in the fall. The more experienced students were available to iterate on scoring mechanisms for nearly the entire build season. Of course we worked like crazy during the build season, but we didn't come as close to burning out as we have in years past.
So, in summary, don't expect FIRST to change the rules to make things easier on you. To protect yourselves from burnout during the build season, change how your team works. Start thinking NOW about how the team can work less hard during build season. Are you doing skills development during build season when you could be developing skills ahead of time? Are you fabricating parts during build season because you don't have time to purchase COTS parts? Are you purchasing COTS parts during build season that you could have purchased ahead of time? Is it better to have a perfect robot just barely in the bag, or is it better to have a pretty good robot with lots of time for practicing and tweaking?
This year we chose to do the latter, and from a robot design and build perspective, we were successful. Unfortunately, we forgot one little detail. Having time to practice does you little good if you don't have a place to practice. We are currently working to fix that problem, but that's the topic of
another thread...