Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
Why is that? Surely you don't work on the robot between the time you bag it on the prescribed date and the time you regain access to it for your first competition. Are you nitpicking the difference between 42 and 45 days? Or are you bagging an unfinished robot and counting on a withholding allowance to let you build the rest of it outside the official build time to bolt on later?
Instead of removing bag & tag, I would very much like to see the withholding rules go back to the "identical spare parts" wording, or even go away entirely.
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Speaking as head coach of a team that's spent three years consciously working towards being highly competitive (observing and interviewing top teams, and emulating them)... limiting withholding to identical spare parts or removing it entirely wouldn't particularly have an effect on our ability to work outside the six weeks and within the rules. We rebuilt a significant portion of our robot at one of our events this year (state champs) and when we ran out of withholding allowance we simply designed mechanisms that we could build from raw materials & COTS, during the practice match period, and with equipment we can reasonably fit in our 10x10 pit. We built up the new mechanisms once or twice at home to make sure we knew what problems to expect, used the practice robot to do dry runs of tearing mechanisms down and rebuilding them to improve speed, and then left all that at home and packed up the raw material and COTS to do it all over again. From week one of build we planned our season around continuous iteration through World Champs. District #1 goal was breach & score low, District #2 goal was breach and score high, State Champs goal was vision tracking auto (spectacular fail, busy rebuilding everything else), and World Champs goal was add scaling (also fail, turns out it's hard to do much in the 10 days between states and worlds).
Per the original topic on what HQ can do to remove barriers to continued participation... reduce costs, particularly in registration fees. I guess I've always assumed that the initial registration fee is a marketing decision (it's like a fancy car, would lose prestige if it were lower) but I'll give HQ benefit of the doubt and say that the current revenues are justified and well utilized. What would we be willing to go without in exchange for reduced initial registration fee and/or reduced district champs/second regional registration fee? Kit of Parts? Personally I'd probably give up KoP if it meant a few thousand saved.