Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon Stratis
This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.
You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.
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Respectfully I disagree.
It may be that your team's circumstances enable you to get this absolutely right and your drivers trained in 6 weeks. However plenty of other teams have this issue beside Team 11 & 193 (who has stuck with one robot as they desire). So I'd love to see a poll of how many teams build a 2nd robot because they feel they need to and as an option because they want to.
It's hardly just an engineering issue. There's weather. There's logistics.
There's the 2 pizza problem (remember we are student led and there are a lot of students). The fact we hold the FLL championship for NJ, an FTC competition and an FRC district event. Again when you compare teams you need to really think about what loads are on those resources.
Sure we could make some choices to make the problem smaller - the point is making these choices comes at a price not just for our teams.
Also do not discount luck in the competition itself. Sometimes the difference between success and disaster is just luck. For example Tom posted below that your region matters. That's just luck you happened to have competitors between you and your achievement that weren't better able to stop you or get lucky themselves.