Stronghold is certainly the roughest game in recent memory; I'm not qualified to say anything about the early years. It was clearly the most brutal terrain since Breakaway. IIRC, a Breakaway bot could opt to go under those walls; in Stronghold, there was no (legal) way around (under) the opposing defenses, and crossing most defenses twice was actually a Ranking Point game objective (breaching), and doing many crossings is usually essential to another (capturing the tower). All of the reliable shortcuts and workarounds to robots directly crossing the defenses were plugged by game rules.
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Originally Posted by dirtbikerxz
It really is, and plus Aerial Assist simply didn't have that much brute force on either the frame or the bumpers (I've been told). Most of the bumpers I saw falling off, happened when the robot hit a defense the wrong and got stuck.
Tell me, (I wasn't a part of aerial assist) did bumpers fall off often in aerial assist?
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I don't recall nearly as many lost bumpers in Aerial Assist. There were massive bumper-to-bumper hits - harder than I've seen in Stronghold. This is because the field had no obstructions except the four corner goals. However, this force usually drove the bumpers INTO the robot; Stronghold has many more cases where bumpers are exposed to high shear forces. This was the first time since Breakaway that bumpers were regularly slamming
vertically into field elements. Further, in Aerial Assist, teams mostly tried to lower the bumpers as close to the ground as possible, to make picking up that 24" ball easier. In Stronghold, most bumpers topped out between 11" and 12" to make it easier to get over the defenses (and in many cases the boulder intake is BELOW the bumpers this year).
Between the many angles of collision and the high number of "bumper rookies" there were bound to be a lot of bumpers on the carpet. Even veteran teams were short on bumper tribal knowledge -- our fifth year team had four students who played both Aerial Assist and Stronghold. Two did wiring and two did programming for Aerial Assist - none touched a bumper except to help swap them out while on pit duty. Our bumper knowledge was from mentors. Our returning technical mentors had never dealt directly with bumpers in the past except as something to work around, though we do have a NTM who took part in bumper sewing (though not mechanical construction or mounting) during our early years. Without the preserved wisdom of CD, we would have probably been in the "bumpers on the carpet" crowd.