[marshall]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

This was brought up in a buried post in a thread from week 0, but after just completing our first event I thought it was important to bring it up.

The real defenses are NOTHING like the wood versions.

If you can, I would highly recommend buying some HDPE sheet and covering your wood defenses with it.

With our wood defenses, our robot crosses them like they're not even there. With the real defenses, we had some real troubles crossing them. The friction is so different that we had to come up with some new techniques for crossing. I knew it would be different, but we didn't realize how much. Be warned.

The portcullis on the other hand was much easier on the real field.

I mentioned this in one of the Palmetto threads... In hindsight, I kind of wish we had put resources into building our own steel/polycarb versions earlier in the season. This is definitely one of the few games in recent memory where the team versions and the actual versions vary this much.

It comes down to the wooden team version being very soft and also providing a different coefficient of friction for treads/tracks/belts/etc. Definitely a learning experience for me.