[MrBasse]

We had several ideas for ways to get to the top that came from students. Some that were designed with way more in depth mechanisms than what we finally settled on. But our final design took some items from all of them, simplified them, and added in a heavy dose of gravity and some extra pneumatics for some help and things worked pretty well all season for us. Our robot was really durable, our only malfunctions came from a leaking solenoid module, and then from dropping a screw that got lost between the connections for the RSL. I was surprised that we could get a tiny screw to land there, but more surprised to learn that the RSL shorting can fry the sidecar instantly.

We felt that we were pretty successful this year, semi-finals at MSC is nothing to look down on. If we hadn't changed strategies in the second and third matches there is a chance we could have made it to the finals too (still can't figure out why we played defense on a broken robot rather than going for our climb).

We had a consistent climb, a 3-4 disc auto and could pick up 1-2 discs if we felt we had time. Our goal was a 68 point round and we hit that pretty often. 62 points was a lot more common as we had a third auto disc issue that we just couldn't figure out. With those numbers we were still quite often the highest scorer on our alliance. Things changed a little bit when we got pair up with some of the super teams at MSC but in those cases we were running out of white discs making us even more valuable.

With that said, I don't think that the 50 point climb teams have anything to worry about when looking back at their seasons. We are happy we did it simply because it was an amazing challenge. We knew we could pick up discs and score a few more points, but we wanted to do the climb because we knew not everyone would. There is something to be said for a group taking the more difficult path solely because it is more difficult. I think the biggest smile I had all season was at kickoff when my students said that they were no doubt going to climb, and maybe shoot discs if we had to...