[Dave]

OOH OOH!!! ME SOOOOO EXCITED!!! WHEEEE-HOOOOO!!!
Pictures of my robot will soon be in the gallery, when you see them, well... bring a change of underwear.
You may remember my team from KSC 2002, at which our robot was comprised of a network of zip-ties suspending everything within our robot, and a sometimes-attached drive system... it never moved. That sucked.
The year before that, our robot was made entirely of plywood, with a hand-bent claw which made it over the ramp a grand total of once. The NASA engineers helped us rebuild our chassis in aluminum after the first day of competition, and it still wasn't too good.
At nationals, we fielded a new robot which we had constructed in the time before the wednesday after the competition, manufacturing "custom parts" which entailed everything except a new R/C.

This year, wow.... We have constructed A robot that looks like a mix between a hover MLRS and a Mammoth tank (Command and Conquer) This thing is a mover, it pushed me, an ex-noseguard, while trying to block it AND carrying two people on top of it. Once we cut 6 pounds off... we can put our arms on *sigh*

All this for a team with a bucdget of $3000, completely student run, design, engineered.. etc... is not bad. We made it in my friend's garage... no real machine tools... a teaser will be up later today... this is not the sort of robot you want to be close to, especially if your frame can't take... wait.. lemme see... a good 700 Newtons of force.. (yay physics!)
I sooo happy!
I still kinda wish we had engineering help sometimes...