[ngreen]

Since a lot of my opinion on these thoughts has already been up I'll try to retain my posts to only a couple of these thoughts.

If the quality of the Kit of Parts is definitely one of your issues get out of FIRST. Go put up your own money and purchase the parts you want and go do battlebots or just build it for hobby. If you have that kind of money and see that KOP is ineffective for your imagination do that. There is yet to be a realistic idea that I can think of that we can't do without the current Kit of Parts.

You are right that the KOP could be better but you threw in the magic word. Cost. To raise the cost of up from 5 grand we would see a major drop in teams and teams coming in. FIRST isn't trying to be built to be exclusive. Some may say that FIRST is growing to large for to quick but I disagree. There are definitely areas where FIRST needs to grow including my home state. It is definitely hard to sell people or a school on a program that initially cost 5,000 and can cost a lot more already. But raising the price so that we use "better" parts is unjustified in the mind of a lot of people. Remember this isn't a robotics competition. If you want only to build robots with quality parts go to school and be inspired.

About shipping and missing parts, FIRST could always do a better job at this but you have to remember that a lot of people who help FIRST are volunteers and a lot of parts are donated and that they are building nearly a thousand kits. My closest experience with this is helping filling bags with Easter candy for a local easter egg hunt. We make a couple hundred bags and sometimes things aren't perfectly divided even so someone may get two of one thing while some might be missing that. Whatever the case I am sure there were always teams willing to give parts they weren't using to teams missing those parts. About teams not getting parts for several weeks that is rare and unfortunate. Sometime mistakes are made and I imagine FIRST has already apologized for this.

As to the fake GP. Dealing with other teams to get teams spare parts they need can be difficult. It is again unfortunate that a team used this particular tactic of not being able to move the parts without fully disclosing where it came from and where it was going. I am happy however the team who needed parts was able to get them. I can not be for sure that they would have gotten the spare part if it wasn't for the middle man . I can not be sure that the middle man's team intent was to deceive the two other teams for their personal recognition or it was more that the team wanted to be sure the team would get the spare part.

Although we did similiar things with our program at LSR we never did the things mentioned in these post. We were more on the lines of letting teams see the short list of what other teams had and referring to these teams when didn't have the part. At championship we only got to handing out the three hundred flyers, giving out/loaning out 40+ parts and tools, and making a couple rounds to talk with people. We want to do more next year and involve other teams. I'll write more later under its appropriate thread.

But that is all. I could touch on the others easily but that is it. Good luck on whatever you choose.