[EricH]

Originally Posted by jman4747

I made an edit to be more clear on point 1.1 and 1.2. I wrote them poorly. 1.1 I'm referring to COTS parts. 1.2 is referring to how outsourcing machining to sponsors can save you money on buying COTS at the expense of time.

Translation: We can work with a more flexible schedule. That I can buy. Basically, you don't pay the expedited shipping, and you can have someone make more stuff. (I will note that one of my team's sponsors came on very late in build--we had the parts from them in a very short turnaround. We may be the exception, though...)

"If you can't manage your time effectively now, you'll be just as unable to effectively spread out your extra X weeks and still get your work done. Meanwhile, the teams that are being very effective already will see that they've got extra time to make better iterations, and manage their time well to get that done. And then there's Parkinson's Law..."

And if you can you will benefit from the extra time to focus on other aspects of running the team or your life if you so chose. Which will be easier when you aren't spending as much money and have more help from veteran teams. I know fundraising is a year round endeavor. Emphasis on year round. With a smaller leadership team it's harder to focus on these efforts during build.

Parkinson's Law says that there IS no extra time. "Work expands to fill the time allotted."

Basically, you're proving my point: The teams that already manage their time well ("the rich") will continue to do so and get even better ("get richer") (and maybe even take a couple days off, har har) and those that don't... well, guess what? That makes this an even more uneven playing field than before, which can be discouraging. Discouraged teams can become discouraged former teams a little easier than non-discouraged teams can become non-discouraged former teams.

"*The exceptions here are the long-haul teams: HI, South America, China, UK, and just about any other non-North American team that's traveling to North America to compete."

Is that date after the current bag day? because then they would still have more time than they do now.

I don't know, and I would expect that it varies by competition week and where they're coming from anyways. For a Week 1, it might actually be on bag day. For a Week 2... I checked B&T forms for "crate teams" at a Week 2, didn't see any unbag time logged. Not sure about the teams at the Week 4 I was at as I wasn't inspecting.

For those guys, you need to understand: If the robot isn't in the crate, it's gotta travel by suitcase. That gets ugly fast. Now imagine that you not only have to ship the robot, but nobody else has a "hard stop" to building theirs. They get two weeks on you, just of build time. Two weeks is a lot of time in this game.