[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by JesseK

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".

I still think this is overly-strong and not at all necessarily true.

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?)

I don't see that our success this year was "at the expense of other teams." Granted, I don't have perfect knowledge or perfect memory, but I try to keep track of how the matches go so I can offer help to teams if their robots are damaged, and I can't think of any matches where our defense caused a lasting problem to another robot that cost them future success, and I certainly would not have advocated for a defensive strategy if I felt that this was an unavoidable consequence of it.

Moreover, "deserved" is a loaded term - rather, there is a certain level of damage that your robot will attain during normal competition that is deemed acceptable under the rules. This has to be the case if robot to robot contact is going to be permitted at all. Designing for and dealing with this is as much a part of the game as building mechanisms to manipulate the game pieces and score points. I do not think our strategy last year went past this standard in terms of impact on other robots.

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.

I don't think you can construe the benefit we gained from a 6CIM drive drain as being in this category. We did not benefit because we caused irreparable damage to sturdily-built mechanisms; indeed, I can't think of a time we caused serious damage to any other robot's mechanism.

And, again, whether 6-CIM drives are a good thing for FRC in general is a completely different question from how beneficial they are in robot design.