Quote:
Originally Posted by Wayne TenBrink
At MSC, qualification matches start on Thursday afternoon - similar to CMP, except the 64 teams each get 12 qual matches.
As for the district events, I have never regretted not having practice day on Thursday. The 6/8 hour unbag time in our own shop is much more useful. At MI disricts, pits open Thursday evening and they try to get the robots through inspection. They run unscheduled practice matches early Friday morning and try to get every robot on the field at least once to make sure their radios communicate with the field. In other words, between Thursday evening and Friday early morning, we are able to accomplish most of what happens on Thursday at a traditional regional. Since the districts are limited to 40 robots, we still get in 12 qual matches in by noon Saturday.
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That's been a mixed bag for 1712. In 2013, we definitely need the unbag time in our own shop much more than practice time. We still had plenty of work left to do on our machine, and having access to it in our shop was tremendously beneficial (even after our first event).
In 2012, however, we were essentially done with our machine a few days prior to bagging it. Having access to a full field would have been tremendously beneficial for testing/tuning our autonomous, getting additional driver practice, and would have revealed to us that our bridge manipulator was going to have issues with a competion bridge (as opposed to our team drawings bridge, which it could tip just fine). It could have helped us prevent the most significant issue we battled with through both of our 2012 districts (eventually solved at MAR championship).