[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Dave McLaughlin

I think that you make a "fair" point Eli. However, I would counter with the opinion that effectively extending build season until a teams first competition would do more harm than good. If a team is indeed building their robot in a garage with hacksaws and hammers I would be of the opinion that 1-5 more weeks of build would have little impact on the final robot that competes. It is not their fault, especially if they are rookies, there is just only so much you can do with limited resources.

On the other hand, if you give a team with high end manufacturing capabilities, and a comfortable budget 1-5 more weeks to refine a single robot I think that the end results would be astonishing. The bag day provides all teams the same deadline, and the withholding allowance gives all teams the same opportunity to make changes to their competition robot at competition, or during a work window.

This is a "fairly" () polarized representation of the capabilities of FRC teams. I guarantee that there's a huge number of fairly capable teams with limited resources that would benefit hugely from the type of extended build time that a second robot currently provides; it's not only teams with 6-axis waterjets who put out winning robots and teams with hacksaws and hammers who are hopeless.

Moreover, I'm not all that certain that removing the bag requirement would have much impact at all on the higher-end teams, given the size of the witholding budget and the fact that all parts they build between bag day and competition can be interfaced with an exact copy of the bagged robot and tested. There might be some complete rebuilds that would be enabled by this that wouldn't otherwise be possible, but much of the work is stuff that teams are already able to do.