Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard
The elite teams already are skipping stop build day via practice bots. Elite teams already are doing complete robot rebuilds
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Not even just elite teams. Spectrum is by no means elite but we did a full rebuild this past season and we copied ideas we saw from other teams. (Thanks 118, and others). It was a very hard decision to scrap 7 weeks of work for a new idea but we know our robot wasn't competitive. It took a very long time to get the new "cloned" robot working half way descently. This was definitely a rushed job and better clones could be made with more time but largely it would require you to be be building your clone through most of competition season. You would not have any time to actually test it at a real event. Almost any clone is going to be worse then the orgional (for an entire FRC robot) because you don't have all the experience gained from the prototyping and design phase.
I think 2014 is a good place to look to see if the majority of teams would really clone another robot. It was pretty clear early on that 254 had a very special design once you saw the robot. A lot of teams could have probably used withholding and COTS parts to build something that cloned their robot, but to my knowledge none of the elite teams did that because they believed tweaking and getting better with their own robot had a better likely hood of success. The equation wouldn't change all that much if you got rid of stop build.