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This is going to be great!
First I get to call physical plant at my school:
Me: "Hi, Jay, its Gabriel, you know how you offered to let us use that big room on the second floor of the brand new athletic center?"
Jay: Yeah
Me: ...yeah, well is it alright if we flood the place?
Jay: WHAT????
Me: How 'bout if we just take over the pool for six weeks, remove all the lane-lines and crap and drain it to the appropriate level?
*CLICK*
(Actually, I think they might actually go for the idea, when we were getting tours of campus on orientation the Aquatics Director said: "we don't like to think of it as a pool, we like to think of it as an aquatics experience center" - they've had such silliness as a performance of The Tempest and a "multimedia rave" in the pool)
But imagine how much fun retrieving robots after competition is over will be. We'll all get to dress up like fishermen!
And then there are the regionals, where they'll have to turn theatre stages and parts of colliseum floors into giant bathtubs. Maybe it would work at Reliant Park (IIRC they had big drains on the field) but I don't think it would go over too well at the Meadows theatre.
And how are you going to keep the water on the field? If its a few inches deep I'd imagine that robots would spray water everywhere, if its a few feet deep how is the audience going to see the competition? Are you going to build giant plexiglass walls around each field?
Then at the end of each day we could have a big Mopping party where everyone mops up the pits.
You might also run into problems changing the battery or doing any other sort of electrical work on a sopping wet robot. Most people in the pits are careful, but I've run into more than a few morons (including myself) who might create some serious litigatable issues.
On the plus side however we'd all get to say "Arrr" and "To the starboard Captain!" and "Captain! Hull Integrity Failing - we have to engage the emergency tertiary phase-matrix-reduction unit" -- not that some of us don't say those things anyway...
I think its a great idea and I'd do it in a heartbeat, I just don't think any sane person would.
Actually, why bother with robots at all? It would be a hell of a lot more fun to just build real ships with cannon and everything and compete in the local harbor. There could be some serious broadside action! And think of the plank-walking opportunities! And I heard there was a decommissioned WWII Aircraft Carrier on sale a little while ago and I might know of a few places to get some 19th century cannon, I mean, they're just sitting there, nobody's using them, I'm sure they won't mind if we take a couple off their hands.
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