Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared Russell
But I am not sure why functionally identical fabricated replacement parts are no longer allowed in unlimited quantities. Isn't letting each team field a fully functional robot for the entire event more inspirational and important than any of the possible reasons why this rule exists?
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Considering that this is both the most violent game of the bumper era, and extending outside the frame perimeter is essentially necessary to complete many basic game tasks, I hope that FIRST reconsiders this policy.
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As I was reading through the manual on Bag Day, I wondered why the 'identical replacement parts' clause had been removed as well. I guess looking at it one way, some may have argued that this essentially allowed teams to 'upgrade' their robot while still keeping the parts 'identical' (to most observers) - but then again, even that doesn't seem to make sense.
Regardless, the whole 'keeping the practice robot in the trailer' thing doesn't bother me one bit. Looking at the 120lbs of robot sitting in the parking lot, I'd be willing to bet that a minimum of 1/4th of it could be made into 'unmodified COTS' components, at which point, if the team were to use them, it'd really be no different than getting a replacement from spare parts. After that, assuming you've removed about 30lbs of COTS stuff, you've probably got 90lbs of robot left. How much of that 90lbs is actually stuff that can be transferred from one machine to the other? I'd be willing to wager not much more than half, if even that much... You've got to remember, the team in question would be disassembling their robot in the parking lot to get a spare off of it, so I highly doubt they're going to spend 2-3-4 hours taking the thing apart just to replace something on their comp bot, but who knows.
All of that being said, I understand why people are arguing it's illegality, and I'd have to say that depending on how exactly you phrase it, it's either illegal or at least 'questionable' - but I'm not sure if it's really the biggest problem here... There are teams out there that struggle to build competitive machines every year, and are tempted by 'stretching' the bagging rules - we've all heard about it, and probably have seen it happen first hand - these are the teams that we should be worried about, not the ones with the practice robots in the trailer. I'd be willing to argue that most teams with a practice machine in the trailer aren't going to be the ones that you have to worry about stretching the unbag rules...
One last note on the spare parts thing, I'm pretty sure that removing the 'identical part' clauses from the unbag/witholding limits only serves to hurt under resourced teams. Technically, according to the rules, I could in theory, use one of my unbag periods to turn some amount of raw materials into spare parts, throw them in the bag, and be perfectly fine. The only limiting factor here would be the resources the team has access to during the unbag period - which as we know, varies greatly from team to team...