[mathking]

Originally Posted by Siri

We're playing with unreasonable numbers either way, but I feel like I should point out that your fuel tank can indeed extend over your bumpers so long as it starts within your frame perimeter. The only mandatory volume loss is the volume of the bumpers themselves (but for that matter the battery and other required components).

In terms of scouting it, your first general pass won't need to be very specific. You might just write Low/Med/High on the forms and wait a few matches at your event to help your scouts get a feel of each and set standards based on your alliance selection needs. One of the most useful metrics will be how fast an alliance hits 40 kPa and how much (cycles and which goal) a team had to do with it. By the time specifics really matter (District and Half Champs), the community will have built up a whole jargon for handling this, and your scouts will have the benefit of experience. Too often I see teams get overwhelmed trying to collect more detail than they need or are ready for and miss the forest for the trees.

This. The number one mistake I see in scouting is teams collecting a lot of detail that they don't need. For scoring, we are going to try to keep a count of cycles with general categories for number of balls in each cycle. We are hoping to use the scoring data from each match to get the amount of fuel scored and divide that up among the teams on each alliance based on our observations. The fallback position if this proves to tough is to use a scale (probably 5 points from awesome to bad) and cycle time as a proxy.

In any event, collecting relevant data is a great thing to do scouting wise. But in my experience you also need to have scouts making subjective judgments and recording those. Things like "they get in their allies way a lot" or "the driver adapts well to changing conditions on the field" or even "wow that driver is amazing." Over the years this has served us well in finding good alliance partners and in picking good strategies against opponents. I recall one year when we were the first pick of a really good team who refused our suggestion for the second pick because "we don't ever pick teams with mecanum drive." The mecanum drive robot was picked next, and proved to be the decisive factor in our loss to the other alliance. To their credit, the team that picked us came over to our pit as we were packing up and said "We really should have listened to you."