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I have to agree with all about the addition of time to repair. In 2000 the ball grabber on our robot was destroyed beyond repair in the finals of a regional. We were able to weld up a new one for Nationals and bring it on the plane. Same exact design no improvements. If we had to do that in the pits, I would have rather got a refund on the plane tickets, hotel charges and watched on NASA channel. Should we have built 2 spares and shipped them in 6 weeks, sure it's easy to say that now. I don't know how a team could even build two robots worth of spares in 6 weeks, our team can not with the time budget allowed.
Hey if we wanted we could have built a mini-fridge battlebot with 20 wheel drive this year that no-one could have broke (multiple team members are working on Battlebots right now also) but that wasn't the goal. I think the point is even more important for the real veterans of the event. The robots are an engineering miracle for space, weight and time.
You don't bring a Ferrari to a smash up derby which is what some teams think this is.
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