[Justin Ridley]

Taking the climber off prior to our first regional was 100% not due to weight. It was instead due to the fact that it just wasn't good enough. Good enough for us was a 10-15 second climb. This was the metric we were shooting for during the 6 weeks. When we went into the bag, the climber was at its best 30-45 seconds to line up to the pyramid and climb to the top. After seeing how discs were being scored in the week 1 regionals we decided we could add a simple 10 point hang and score more than the 20 "extra" climb points with discs in those last 45 seconds.

With the climber we were right near 120lbs. Removing it allowed us to "put weight" into other systems and make them better, increasing the overall scoring potential of the robot.

In addition the climbing was always extremely nerve racking and we weren't at the point where we had confidence we wouldn't fall. Taking it off and eliminating the possibility of a tournament ending face plant was a side benefit of our decision.

We kept working on the climber but realized it was never going to meet our speed metric. In addition we'd need to re-lighten mechanisms back to their original config to put it back. We decided the robot would always be better overall without it.

It was a cool climbing method that we spent A LOT of time on. It's too bad it didn't pan out but it was fun to work on and taught us a lot.