first off, its clear to me that these two teams dont think they have broken the rules, or done anything wrong, or they would never have gone down this path. they have put several months (apparently) into this collaboration idea, coming up with the idea before the kickoff meeting, when there was no Q&A forum to ask - the danger there is the longer you go nurturing your idea without getting an official judgement, the more you convince yourself that there is nothing wrong with it
and I suspect by the time of the kickoff they had already convinced themselves what they were doing was ok, so they did not trouble FIRST with the question.
Nobody here is accusing these two teams of deliberately setting out to cheat or bend the rules - you can believe what you are doing is good and right, but still be wrong. I think that is the case here.
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Putting all other issues aside, I think KenW is just trying to address the issue of the letter of the rule, and that is, the robot can only use parts build by your own team, and parts that isn't built by your own team is limited by the $3500 rule. So, it is OK if you use parts not build by your own team, as long as they are within the $3500 limit. Otherwise it is against the rules.
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this is NOT the problem I see with the rules - this is not a issue of who machined the parts or how much they cost.
The issue is that the rule I quoted several pages back clearly states that teams must fabricate and assemble ALL of their custom parts and assemblys after the kickoff meeting
Clearly each team must fabricate their OWN robot. Clearly you cant hire a professional design consulting team to come in and design and fabricate your subassemblies for you, then only bill you for the machining costs.
One team here designed and fabricated the drive trains, the other designed and fabricated the arm, and they bartered (traded) one for the other. That is a form of payment - not only for the machine shop time, but for the custom design of a subsystem intended specifically to play this years game.
The extreem extention of this, if it is allowed to stand: you will end up with small teams who have no resources signing up for 'design and fabricate' alliances in which several other teams design one subsystem each, then build 10 or 20 of them, and the smaller teams end up doing nothing but making buttons or tee shirts for the other 20 teams they allied with, or checking every teams kit of parts for missing components, or whatever trivial task they feel they can do because they have no engineers, money, machine shop or resources.
FIRST is hard. FIRST is suppose to be hard. If you dont have the mentors or resources to build a full custom robot then you have to make design tradeoff decisions and use some of the stuff FIRST gave you, the default transmissions, the default code, the default wheels.... That is a part of engineering - that is what has made this program so successful: it IS hard - it IS challenging - its the most difficult 6 weeks most students have ever experienced in their lives - and thats why they come back next year - they have been challenged to their maximum capacity and they LIKE what they found in themselves.
One last thing - I keep hearing people say how generous with their previous designs they are - everything is posted in white papers and they share all their designs. That is excellent, its great to raise the bar and then make your work public domain.
But please stop and consider that there are a lot of us out here who do not copy everything you do, who are not following in your wake saying thankyouthankyouthankyou we could not do this without you.
Some of us LIKE to brainstorm our own ideas, to come up with our own designs, to look at each year as a new challenge, and to put the students right smack in front of it. Sure we look at what other teams have posted in white papers and such, but if you could build your whole machine from other teams previous designs, then what is the point. Personally I dont think FIRST is intended to be program to train and inspire future machinist and welders.
The design is the thing.
I hope 60 and 254 can take a step back and see this, and understand why others are not only upset, but genuinely offended.