Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunshine
Many have complained about the lack of defense. We were delighted to see this. Why? Year after year we have created a competitive robot. But we do not have the facilities to produce what I would characterize as an industrial type robot that will hold up to the constant pounding. A robot that could constantly take the punishment of a contact to contact defensive game without some type of breakage or failure. We envied those teams that could build a bot that withstood the punishment. This year our robot has had zero breakage or need for major repair (knock on wood) because of the lack of defense. No defense has benefitted our limitations in making a robot as robust as the elite teams.
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We built our robots out of shipping container through last year--we finally have a shop this year. We finally got a manual mill last year but probably didn't make much difference. I think we demonstrated that you can build a sufficiently robust robot to get pretty deep into competition with relatively minimal facilities.
I think that having defense is imperative in team sports to keep the competition interesting, which is the point of FIRST. I can't think of a team sport that is primarily parallel play. The primary focus of FIRST is social engineering vs technical engineering.