[cadandcookies]

You definitely aren't the only team having trouble with the mountain. I think a lot of teams are either underthinking how they'll climb the mountain or overthinking their capabilities.

I'd recommend coming into designing your drive train knowing what you want your robot to do. There are a number of things that go into that-- when is your first tournament? What do you want to spend most of your time working on? Do you and your students have a solid grasp of drive mechanisms and the physics involved?

Based on videos and my team's experience, you can get up to the middle zone fairly easily with wheels, but getting to the high zone will be significantly harder. We decided that we weren't even going to worry about the high zone for our first tournament (December 13th), because there were more (and easier to get) points elsewhere in the game.

Having said that, there are a number of things can can make climbing to the middle zone with wheels smoother/easier-- making sure you have your weight in the right place, making sure your wheel spacing is good and your wheels are properly sized, et cetera. Many of the prototypes I've seen for climbing seem to have really narrow wheel bases, which might be nice for turning but won't help with the mountain.

Another suggestion would be to actually physically try your own drive trains out-- if you don't have or can't afford a mountain of your own, you might try reaching out to another team and asking them if you can come over during one of their meetings. CAD can tell you a lot about the mountain, but (at least at the level most FTC and FRC teams are at) it can't substitute for physically trying your ideas on the mountain.

Hopefully that was somewhat helpful.