Quote:
Originally Posted by Oblarg
Place me firmly in the group of people reading this rule as "you must select a set of pre-fabricated parts weighing at most 45lbs prior to competition, and that set cannot change while you are at competition."
If you could not, if asked, state at the beginning of the competition which parts on that practice robot are in your withholding budget and which are off-limits, and if the allowed parts don't weigh under 45 lbs, I'd say you're in violation of the rule.
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That's exactly how I see it. Also, it's very nice that FIRST has finally updated this rule. For years, it was questionably enforceable due to ambiguity. While not ironclad, the word "static" goes a long way. However, this does imply that a lot of past practice is illegal, which may not go over well with the teams.
There is no standard process for providing documentation of that set of parts, and teams typically won't be asked about it—but if you are asked by an official, you will need to be able to put a list together and justify it. This isn't supposed to be like
collapsing the waveform, where the state is only determined when the information is collected—to comply with the requirement that it be static, that set has to be predetermined, even if it isn't documented.
If in the position to enforce the rule, I would interpret it leniently and say that the set can change between competitions. (The rule refers to "an" event, not to all events, so that interpretation is plausible, and certainly practical.)
As for the teams who could be in a position to access their shop (or other resource where more than 45 lb of fabricated parts exist) during a regional event, they need to be able to justify how some of those parts are in fact inaccessible. There's no required procedure, but whatever you come up with needs to effectively limit access. Again, you aren't typically asked, but if you are asked, your answer should have been predetermined.