Quote:
Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV
Just to clarify I'm LRI at Alamo and volunteer at a lot of events. I welcome the opportunity to politely ask people to go home when pits are closing and I'm often close to the the last person out. Myself and my team also have done field setup at Lone Star each of the past 3 years. We could easily still do this and have a couple people putting up our shelves in our pit so we don't have to do it Thursday morning.
All notes about working on the robot during that time are just silly to me. You have weeks with your robot in the bag at your facility; if your morals are so low that you are going to cheat why in the world would you do it when you could be caught. Bag and Tag is an honor system to begin with, at the events is the only time when its even remotely enforceable.
I'm also sure we could find a few volunteers that would stay and let teams run on the field Thursday night. I'm pretty sure the IRI practice field has 2-4 volunteers max and it seems to do just fine each year. The fields see a ton of events and off-seasons and they hold up pretty well. If 24 more hours of play time (4 hours * 6 weeks) is going to severely damage the field we are building in way to small margins on what they can take.
The ability to put a better product on the field should be the goal for all these rules. Pits and robots that are set up and ready to go when the competition starts is better for spectators, students, parents, news crews, and everyone else we are putting on these events to inspire.
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Well said Allen!
I still think the issue of working on the robot can be easily worked around: one volunteer writes down the tag number for each team's bag as it walks in the door during load in and does a quick bag inspection. This is just like we've always done it and it can be done by one inspector on the first night. Thursday morning when the entire inspection staff is there goes around to verify the same tag is on the bag and the bag is still intact. This is not hard to implement.
If we really allow teams to get to work on their robots straight off the bat on Thursday morning you will see inspections start sooner, more teams will be able to practice, keep the field open for longer on Thursday, and the level of competition at events will increase as well. This benefits a lot of teams!