[Iaquinto.Joe]

Originally Posted by EricWilliams

What people say on this forum affects the thinking of a LOT of bright young people. A one sentence shoot-down of their ideas (especially ones with this kind of potential) is not really the atmosphere I assumed we'd want to strive for.

My response was written to offer a counter-argument and I believe the merits of my idea are pretty basic. If your team is designing your robot in good faith that other robots will be designing their bot in a specific way you are not going to have a fun time at competition. All robots touch the floor, the ball touches the floor, other robots are picking up from the floor. It's as simple as that. Any discussion of a porthole for the ball is wasted breath. Secondly, standardization of robot mechanisms would require a governing organization, and because the GDC isn't going to create one for us, we would need to do it ourselves. Any organization that want's to create itself for this purpose is going to have very few members unless their design is 100% better than any other design out there for every team (Which isn't going to happen). FRC teams have enough design restrictions as it is and they do not have an incentive to put another on themselves. Yes it would be mature and a good display of GP, but the fact of the matter is that teams own their robot, they are not going to adopt an organization's design. Furthermore, any group of teams that accomplishes the task of developing a coalition of teams for this design and building capable robots has to rely on the FMS to place them together in qualification matches and be able to pick each other in elims.