Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared Russell
Citation needed?
If you look at the top 20 teleop high goal OPR teams, only 5 of them (195, 1024, 118, 148, 230) are catapults.
If anything, side-by-side dual wheel shooters a la 971, 987, and countless others were the way to go this year.
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It's pretty clear multiple designs can be optimized this year to a level of effectiveness good enough for high level play, and it's kind of hard to just go with the most popular design as the best one. After all (and I
know I will get flak for this) mecanum drive was almost strictly better than traction drive last year, particularly for landfill robots, yet lots of top teams stayed away from it. This wasn't necessarily because they made the wrong choice - in a lot of cases, they decided they could more easily optimize the type of system they know better.
We have had a LOT of games with wheeled shooters in the last decade for foam balls - it's a known problem with lots of examples of great designs. We have had relatively few catapult games, and the catapult games featured much larger balls being thrown farther than the small balls, so the catapult design was more exotic.
Maybe it would have been more accurate to say "I think a catapult would have been better for my team", than the general case.