-Only quaffles can be grounded, and the process of clearing quaffles is detailed in the manual
-Launched bludgers must make contact with a robot before contacting the ground for their effect to take place. This has been clarified in the rules under G16.
The game design committee believes that a good design will be able to utilize bludgers successfully without a high level of skill or precision. If you feel your design is incapable of this task, we suggest that you spend more time iterating.
-There are no rules supporting your idea that a bludger "ejected from a robot 2 seconds into teleop couldn't be picked up by the oppposing alliance". Unless this is a product of not reading the rules carefully, we ask that you cite the rules that would cause this statement to be true so that we can fix it.
-The game design committee does not believe that bludgers are any more dangerous to robots than
prior years game pieces. Design your robots robustly and you should be fine. Intentional damage will be judged as it always has been. The idea of intentional damage is not a new innovation.
-Each alliance provides their own Golden Snitch (which goes through inspection and is regulated so that all are the same), so each alliance is responsible for their snitch not dying on the field. This is similar to the minibots of 2011.
-The 6 foot radius was chosen as an arbitrary value that the game design committee decided was a large enough space to deter robots not in pursuit of a snitch to stay away from, as well as one large enough that pursuit of the snitch could be clear and relatively easy to follow.
-All of our refs are trained in martial arts, and nobody can fight a ref's decision and win unless their robots are powder coated blue (because that's just how we roll).
I hope these answer your questions. Thank you very much for your interest in our project. In the event you still haveconcerns about the viability of the use of bludgers, we suggest that you train your drivers to
dodge wrenches.