[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by JesseK

What I really find striking is that you seem to being saying the point of defense is to hit and that the hits have no "legitimate" post-match impacts to the teams on the receiving end. You also follow that up with saying that more motors allows a team to hit harder, more often and for longer, all in the name of gaining position.

The point of defense is to prevent the opposing robot from completing the scoring task. The easiest legal way to do this is by hindering their movement. Hitting them does just that. There's a reason we have bumpers and the manual every year stresses that robots must be robust.

We did not incur a single penalty this year for overly-rough contact. I take that as pretty firm evidence that we were not causing undue damage to other robots out there. I'm sure we contributed a fair bit to other team's wear-and-tear (after DC we found a nice big dent on our AM14U), and I've made no claim that this isn't a "legitimate" effect, but if FIRST did not want this to happen the rules would not explicitly provide for bumper-to-bumper contact between robots.

The reality of the season (particularly when examining 4464's video) is that the defender simply wants to use the acceleration to make up for the fact that it screwed up and was already out of position. This was evident even when examining other events' video (which I did a ton of while scouting for Champs) and correlating the teams who won via defense with teams who had 6 CIMs at champs.

This argument seems to be along the line of "if you had perfect drivers, the extra acceleration would not be necessary/helpful." Which might be true (I reserve judgement, though I find it dubious), but it's completely irrelevant, because no one has perfect drivers and no one is in the exact right place at every moment.

The point of this thread, and the counter argument I'm making, is discussing whether or not increasing available power to the drive trains makes sense from a game design perspective. I don't know that you've argued in favor for either so much as you've tried to justify and/or glorify what 6 CIMs can do. Perhaps you could clarify for me?

I've made several very specific points as to why 6-CIM drives can be an advantage for certain strategies. In fact, in this response you've pretty much acknowledged one of them (giving your drivers more headroom to make up for mistakes). Moreover, I don't really understand your second-to-last sentence here - what would an argument in favor of 6 CIM drives as a design choice consist of if not "justifying what they can do" for a robot?

You seem to be making a blanket statement that "any team that claims success due to additional motors on their drive is either downplaying the negatives or was trying to damage other robots." I contend that this is clearly false.

Now, there is a discussion to be had about whether or not FRC, as a whole, is better for the move towards bigger and beefier drive-trains, but that is a separate question entirely.