Quote:
Originally Posted by Flak-Bait
I don't agree. For the most part, it doesn't force prioritizing or diversity, it forces many teams to build the same robot. More complicated drivetrains (swerve/mecanum) are a bigger pain to pull off, and many hundreds of teams built the exact same robot- 4/6wd human-fed linear shooter. The biggest variation was whether the team build a linear or curved shooter, but other than that, differences in functionality are minimal. The only really cool design difference, the height of the robot with regards to full-court shooting (60") or making it under the bar (<30") was not based on size, it was based on the field.
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and with that, you've completely ignored 2 other viable design options this year: Blocking and climbing. There were a wide array of blocking designs, from ones that were removable to ones that could extend up to block a FCS. For climbing, there were again a wide variety of designs - even teams that climbed the same part of the pyramid (corner or side) had drastically different designs. Yes, there were really only two ways to shoot a frisbee - linear or curved. This wasn't because of the size constraint... it was because of the physics of actually shooting a frisbee. And yes, you see more shooters than anything else... but I think that's due to the (real or perceived) cost and benefits of tackling each part of the challenge. If climbing was as "easy" as shooting and perceived by everyone to be "worth" as much, we would have seen a lot more climbing robots.
The key point, however, is that with a smaller footprint it makes it very, very hard to build a robot that can do everything. As a result, teams have to prioritize and choose what they'll do.
From a strategy perspective, you end up with matches that play very differently based on what each robot is capable of doing. Who does the blocker try and stop, the shooting robot or the climbing robot? If you have 3 short robots, how do you stop the FCS you're going against? This goes directly against what we've seen the past few years. Last year, everyone mostly stayed on their side of the field, shot as many baskets as they could and balanced a bridge. The only question was how many robots would be on that bridge. The year before, you were split with two robots putting up tubes and one playing defense for most alliances, and everyone had an identical minibot to deploy by week 2. By forcing the "elite" teams to make choices in their design, we create a much better competition overall.