[aka Scott White]

It seems like the destruction of your mouse was the result of an unfortunate series of events that no one could have predicted, but I have to agree with fast frank when he says that from a drivers perspective, it is sometimes difficult to control your robot. I was a little guilty of this myself.

Our robot's bearing system kept popping out of its housing (due to the large amount of friction our 30 inch long treads generated while turning), in almost every match we competed in. Since we didn't have the time in the pits to rig up anything more than a quick fix at this point, we didn't have terribly high hopes for our robot for the match outher than heading straight accross the field, harpooning a goal in the process. Then we saw who our alliance partner was; team 550. Their robot was basically a box with a revolving cane on top to hook a goal with. The robots we were going up against was team 613 (i think) who had two catch and release harpoons mounted on their robot, and another team whose number escapes me, who had a massively powerful drive system. It was my turn to drive, so we looked at our competition and said "well, looks like we won't be winning this one, lets just go in there and try to get some practice pushing goals around."

The match started, and 550 went across the field to get a goal, and we moved up a little and intercepted 613 pushing a goal into their goal zone. Unfortunatly, their robot seemed to stall out while pushing the goal, so they couldn't really move it into the zone enough for us to get a good angle on it, and with them behind it, our robot stalled out pushing both . I began pulling back and ramming the goal, and succeeded in moving it back about a foot each time we hit it. After it was out of our zone, I drove around to the side of 613, and began pushing their robot directly, but did not succeed in doing much. I tried moving around to the other side of their robot, and pushing from that side. At this point, our harpoon inexplicably dropped, directly onto the top of their robot. We immediately tried to bring it up again, which took about three seconds. By that point it was too late. 613's light was out, and I don't remember seeing their robot move for the rest of the competition.

Unfortunate? Yes. Belligerant? No. However, I did see an act that was. Team 203's (Campbell's Soup) robot "Rocky" was in the middle of a match when their endzone scoring apparatus accordianed out. Another team saw this, and grabbed a goal, and first ran over their scorer, then dragged the goal back and forth accross it until everyone could clearly hear the metal snapping.
The other team was not penalized, although it was clear that this was intentional, planned destruction.

Hopefully, at nationals, the judges will be a little more discerning.