Quote:
Originally Posted by Oblarg
As far as my design philosophy goes, if your "big-risk-big-reward" drive truly qualifies as "big risk" (for any reasonable definition of "big"), then you probably shouldn't do it. Drive is far too crucial to baseline ability to play the game to be gambling with. From what you describe, it sounds like you now have enough experience with swerve that the risk is not significantly above what less-capable teams would experience with a much more trivial drive system.
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Absolutely true, but I was attempting to define "big risk" in your context, which appeared to be "Keep it simple, keep it durable, keep it serviceable.
You cannot break any of those rules, ever, if you want your drive to do its job" (emphasis mine, the risk being breaking any of those rules). For us, it is not a significantly
different risk, but it is very much breaking that three-fold requirement. It's the view of them as "rules" to which I object. Viewing them as hard-and-fast imperatives sets artificial limits below what at least some teams are capable of pushing themselves to and learning from.
As for off-season prototyping, certainly (and we did pre-2010), but no matter what--if you're iterating the way you should--the first year's always going to be more risky than the following. At some point you've got to jump. We probably would've had a better first year performance if we'd spent another off-season waited until 2011, but we also probably wouldn't be as far along as we are now, and another year of students wouldn't have had the swerve experience. Again, it depends on your goals: we might have done better than semifinalists and 10-12-1 in 2010 with a tank drive, but it was also our second-ever award and an altogether amazing and inspirational (as well as very challenging and somewhat frustrating) experience.
All in all, the point I'm trying to make is teams shouldn't be inherently afraid to think outside the "safe" box, even when the safe box is outlined by very smart people who have their best interest at heart. Basically,
what he says*.
I'm not claiming that Karthik would agree with what I say here--and you can back up from the linked time for the KISS context--but I agree with him, so feel free to view this through the "Effective FIRST Strategies" lens.
*For anyone who's never watched this entire presentation, you are missing something very important from your life. Just saying.