[Ari423]

I have to agree that a good drivetrain won't win you an event, but a bad drivetrain will make you lose.

In 2014, our drivetrain was a sheet metal beauty. A marvel of engineering, to quote our chassis mentor. It only weighed 25 lbs IIRC, and it was sturdy to a fault. However, we spent nowhere near enough time making a manipulator, and we ended up with a robot that couldn't control the ball. At competition, we played lights-out defense, to the point where our opponents scores were consistently 40 puts below their average. We even started keeping a tally of how many robots we disabled throughout the season (we got to 9 in 2 events IIRC). But since we couldn't do anything with the ball, we never got picked for elims and we didn't make it to DCMP.

In 2015, we only spent a few days making a quick VersaFrame and Nanotube gearbox mecanum drive chassis, and we spent a lot more time working on our manipulator. By competition, we had a 100% success rate for stacking (we didn't drop a single stack), which got us picked for elims at all of our events and advanced us to DCMP (almost CMP). However, our drivetrain didn't drive straight or fast, so we wasted a lot of time lining up with the scoring platform. Also, the unnecessary weight in the drivetrain kept us from adding the air storage tanks we needed to speed up our pneumatic elevator. If we spent a little more time on the drivetrain, we might have made it to CMP.

Tl;dr - As a medium-to-low resource team, we did pretty well when we spent more time on the manipulator, but we could have done even better if we improved our drivetrain.