Quote:
Originally Posted by waialua359
Here's something that no one has really elaborated on yet. What about student/mentor talent?
IMO, elite teams will always be elite teams no matter what rules you change. They are good not because they build 2 robots and continually iterate as the main reason. Its plain and simple.....talent.
I was blown away to here recently that teams could put in less than 1/2 the amount of time and build world class, Einstein ready robots.
I dont think you can do that with all the resources in the world or a change in schedule, without first and foremost the talent and experience to do so.
In Jim Zondag's white paper, he specifically names some example elite teams. Change the rules and they will STILL be elite.
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1678 is not an amazing and successfully competitive team because we are talented. We got to where we are today with long hours of mostly well planned out hard work.
We could not have reached as far as we have without the practice robots we build that enable us to keep iterating our designs. In 2013 we were a unknown player to the greater FRC community, nobody knew who we were outside of California. Then we won our division after being turned down by our first 3 picks. We made it that far not because of talent, but because of working our butts off to make our robot ready to compete on the world stage every moment we were able. 2014 was much the same story for us. 2015 we had a good robot, not overly amazing, but our success was because of the time and work we put into developing our can grabbers. We finished the design of our final can grabbers the day before we left for Champs, not one team ever beat those can grabbers.
Our robots would still be good if we didn't build a practice bot, but they wouldn't be Einstein good. And a good robot is useless to a driver that can't drive it to it's potential.