Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Hibner
This may sound like a stupid question, but I'd like some serious responses.
What about shortening the build season to 4 or 5 weeks, with no witholding?
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I don't think I would enjoy that at all.
It would probably be an insane sprint to the finish line with little room for errors, setbacks, iteration and prototyping, weather delays, or non Next Day Air shipping. It would probably involve the same amount of man hours of work, just compressed into the shorter time frame, thus ending up with more all-nighters, which would thus cause more physical health issues and burnout.
You'd be pretty much forced to randomly take a shot in the dark as to what the best design would be, and if you choose wrong you'd be screwed for the rest of the season. You can't prototype for 2-3 weeks in a 4 week build season. Thus, the general quality of robots at the competition would plummet. Autonomous would be nearly non-existent.
You can also pretty much write off any outside machine shop/powder-coating/anodizing sponsor unless they REALLY love helping your team. The only teams with more than a handful of CNC parts will be ones that own their own CNC mill.
Mother nature and blizzards may be a huge problem now, but imagine with a 4 week build season would be catastrophic to loose a week with no withholding. Catastrophic as in throwing in the towel, cutting your losses, and making a super drivetrain defense robot weighted down with cinder blocks because you'll have no hope of honestly fixing or completing any scoring mechanisms.
If a situation arose such as what occurred to me this past build season (I was in China for business for the first three weeks), I'd have no real impact in a 4 week build season.
You can probably forget going through a comprehensive engineering design process in a 4 week build season. Forget iteration and fully CADding everything, just grab random scrap, bolt it together, and hope it works. Think Junkyard Wars. While it may have been fun to watch on television, the less time you have to build, the less time you have to teach and inspire.
// Side comment:
One interesting idea to reduce how much teams could scrap and rebuild from scratch a new robot with an eliminated ship date and bag-n-tag is to use a non-resetting BOM for the entire season. E.g. if you show up to a Week 1 event with a BOM totalling $2500 of parts, you only have $1500 left over for new parts for the remainder of the season unless you reuse parts from your original robot. If the BOMs have to be submitted to TIMS and are locked into a read-only status after a regional (with only the ability to add new items, not delete any old ones), then this effectively limits the scope of how much you can scrap and start over.