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Originally Posted by Tristan Lall
I think that Al's last situation differs in that the excess weight is being used on the field, rather than as a part of something going on in the pits. I submit that a team is given leave to configure the robot however they want during the time that it is in the pits, simply because maintenance often creates temporary, intentional situations where the robot is not legally operable, and as such, it is impossible to apply the rules. To add the motor to the second assembly while that assembly is in the pits is simply a reasonable interpretation of that privilege; to deny a team the liberty to take this action is to also cause a great number of supposedly legitimate maintenance tasks to become illegal. For example, if the team with the multi-bolted robot needed to install all bolts to debug their programming, would it be illegal? Their robot is overweight during that activity, but rest assured that the robot would never compete in a configuration that would cause it to be overweight; I say that Redabot is similar, and that neither of these teams would need to install their extra components during inspection, because they would not be used in a match--merely used to configure the robot in the pits.
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I think the trick is that in the original situation, the extra motor isn't necessarily installed just in the pit and just for maintenence. Presumably, for the modular system to be truly useful, you should be able to make the change just before the match based on the opposing team's percieved strategy. So you would probably be bringing both assemblies out into the arena to make a quick swap. So it's not really a maintenence kind of thing, especially if you're leaving it that way and competing with it that way.