Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux
I still haven't read one statement arguing why bag and tag is still necessary other than statements that hint at "It's the way we've always done it!"
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It's obviously not the way we've always done it. Back in the day, FRC had a single deadline for crating and shipping the robot. At the very beginning of FRC, that was perfectly understandable, because there was a single competition. As regional competitions came to be, with different dates for some of them, it still made sense to keep a consistent crate & ship date so that every team got the same number of days to design and build their robot. Now that shipping crates to competitions is no longer a universal thing, we get the same effect by having a single deadline for placing the robot out of reach of tools.
So there's the past and the present. Now let's consider the future.
Is it still reasonable to "artificially" end robot work on the same day for every team? I think it is. It keeps the playing field level and doesn't put early-competing teams at a disadvantage by giving them less time to work on their robot. High-resource teams can find ways to make productive use of additional time even without access to the robot, of course, but I believe that to be a team strength that should yield benefits. It is not something that can be easily addressed on the "playing field" front.
Having the six week deadline is also a concept that I know many mentors plan on in order to justify deep involvement with a team during the build. Without it, I myself would definitely cut down the time I spend in a given week, and I am pretty sure I would end up contributing significantly less time in total outside the actual competitions.