Quote:
Originally Posted by Qbot2640
Can we avoid "lawyering" the rules here and take what is written at face value? Please stop forcing FIRST to make the rules more and more complex by pushing the limits of interpretation. Demonstrate by model our attempt to go above and beyond to comply to the rules...bring your withholding allowance in to the event, work on your items in the pit, and leave the spare robots (from whatever year they were made) in your shop. If you have some spare COTS items, like Talons or wheels or pulleys...pull them off your practice robot and bring them along.
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You bring up a lot of strong points in your post without a doubt, but I just want to talk on the other side of some of them for a moment, just to illustrate how poorly thought out and written some of the rules are as is.
Lawyering the rules, in my experience, usually stems from a rule set that is either too (or very) restrictive, and/or poorly written. If the rules were written more simply, rather than made complicated, I think the instances of lawyering would decrease significantly.
Take your wheel and pulley example - why is a wheel, with a pulley attached a 'fabricated component' or custom assembly - if all of the parts that it is made of COTS? Who really benefits from a restriction like this? Take my team for example, we wear through a set of (8) wheels once per event, and thankfully this year, we have enough extra parts floating around to be able to make an entire 'spare set' prepped with the gears, sprockets, etc required to swap a wheel. We're well enough within the withholding allowance that doing this doesn't bring us close to the 45lb limit, but if we were, we'd be forced to break all of these wheel assemblies down into their COTS base parts, specifically wheels, sprockets, screws, bearings and gears, and reassemble them on the Day Zero/Practice day of our event. In our specific instance, we're fortunate enough to have more than enough kids to do tasks like this without it being an issue, but not every team is like us. Who really gets hurt here? The teams that are well off, or those who are not?
Here's another way to look at this whole scenario: If I were to organize my spare parts in such a way, that they're essentially one unit for the purpose of bringing them in the door, and storing them in the pit, am I in violation of the rules? Say I took a piece of plywood, drilled a bunch of holes in it, ziptied 10 Speed Controllers, a cRio, a DSC, a PDB, and a bunch of motors to it, do they all become part of a fabricated assembly? Some would argue yes, because technically, they are treated as an assembly, but in reality, I never intend to use them as such... This is significantly different in implementation than bringing a practice bot to an event, but the purpose of the two items is essentially the same.
I guess the TLDR here is that it would be nice if FIRST either relaxed the rules regarding spare parts, or was more specific in how the withholding allowance is to be used. I can't get comfortable with the idea of not being allowed to build spare parts, or spare sub-assemblies, since that either limits how things can be made, and rewards teams that rely heavily on COTS solutions, or forces me to make sure that everything built is capable of withstanding an entire season's worth of abuse....