Quote:
Originally Posted by Oblarg
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."
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The statement is more like "Any team that claims success due to additional motors on their drive has accounted for the negatives in a single subsystem of their own overall robot and was oblivious to or completely ignored the damage they did to other robots multitudes of subsystems".
The rules allow this. It doesn't meant the rules should allow this. I don't fault 4464 for its defense this year since it was actually pretty clean relative to other matches I've watched.
- You capitalized on it - great, I'm glad your team got to move on
- at the expense of other teams - not so great
- whom you never acknowledged or offered to help afterwards - and here's the point of reducing the allowed power on the drive train. Most defenders didn't care ("undue damage"? Really, we deserved damage?)
To phrase it differently...
There's a very public story from 2007 about one team's entire mechanism, made out of 1/8" tube and securely attached, being ripped out by a defender with a powerful drive train (for that year) after the defender shoved the offensive robot into the Rack. The comment from a ref supposedly was "well the mechanism should have been made stronger". The very well-worded public counter argument was something like "to account for THAT type of defense, it is impossible to make a robust enough mechanism".
The story still applies 7 seasons later. There is no type of "robust", without going to extremes, that can be used to account for the amount of power available to drive trains these days and how teams are choosing to use it.