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If you dont have good access to a machine shop, then you need to lean more towards using off the shelf parts - you are sorta in 'desert island' mode - you can only fabricate a limited amount of stuff on your own
for example - the transmissions that FIRST gave us last year werent half bad - and you could alter the final drive gear ratio with the size wheels you used
bolting stuff together out of the kit isnt that bad really - the pnuematic are 100% an off the shelf sort of thing - the only choice you get with them is what cylinders to purchase - so its what you do with what they gave you that makes your machine unique - if you have carefully figured out exactly WHAT you want your machine to do, you will be way ahead of most teams.
Instead of breaking your team up into chassis, drivetrain, manipulators... you might want to break them up by subsystem - the motors and transmission are closely associated with the basic frame, so there is really no reason to have two separate groups working on them
part of breaking the machine up into subsystems is to give each one its allotment of space, weight, motors, pnumatics.. and to have some idea of how its all going to bolt together
you have to pick a starting point and work from there with a little flexibility. Take last years game again - say you wanted to build a bot that would get to the wall fast, and have wings that would spread out and push the wall over. You could draw out a basic frame using the extruded beams they gave us, and tell the chassis and drivetrain people "you get the bottom side of the frame" and tell the wing people "you get the top side - and then map out a space where the RC and battery have to go.
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