[timytamy]

I've been through most of the discussion, but I haven't found anyone who has brought up the topic of international teams.

For arguments sake, if there were no bagging restrictions: From Australia, we must ship at least a week before the regional, as the robot is next to useless if it's not in the right country. When we attended a week one regional, we actually had to cut a few days off our build season, to ensure the robot made it.

In terms of resources, the vast majority of our budget is spent on travel. We prioritizes taking as many students to a regional, which means that a lot of [robot] options are closed off to us. For many international teams, the cost of attending a regional can be orders of magnitude more than the actual robot. The only viable solution [that I can think of] is to get enough teams to have our own regional, but that is still at least a year off [in Australia]

Up until this season, our mechanical lab has been no larger than a shipping container, even with this, last year we built a practice robot (although it was built almost completely AFTER stop build day), and in comp we came to three points from getting to the finals. I suppose this supports the anecdotal data that you don't need massive resources to build a competitive robot.

All said, I'm not sure what the best solution is, but it certainly is complicated...