[KenWittlief]

your only a little out of wack - two or three good wacks should fix you right up :^)

FIRST has said this year that any spare parts you make must be shipped with the robot on the ship date <- EDIT: this part is wrong - see corrections in posts below

- you cant keep making spares at your home site after the ship date, then swap them on your bot at an event.

But you do bring up a good point - in addtion to giving the students driver practice time (which I think is ok) - having a clone-bot also allows you to debug your machine after you shipped it

and as you said, fix the bugs in the original when you get to your first event.

in that regard, yes this does seem to be against the spirit of the rules - it allows teams to do the design and build phases of the design cycle in 6 weeks, then do the test and debug phases after the ship date

so in effect, teams that can afford to clone their bot get a 9 or 10 week 'project schedule' and teams that cant have to finish everything in 6 weeks.