Quote:
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Originally Posted by <R09>
At Events: Teams are allowed to repair, modify or upgrade their competition robots while participating in a FRC event. They may do so only during the period starting with the opening of the Pit area on Thursday and ending at 4:00PM on Saturday. Work may be done on-site in the Pit or
at any facility made available to all teams at the event, e.g., in a team’s repair trailer or a local team’s shop offered to all teams to use.
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The way I see it, in order to argue this is a legal practice, one would have to demonstrate that teams may remove parts from the venue, and furthermore repair, modify, or upgrade them offsite (spatial), and must also demonstrate that this can be done during hours in which the regional is not being participated in (temporal, i.e. 4:00am, which is incidentally the time I'm posting, seeing as sleep is wildly overrated). On top of that, they'd have to make this little repair shop available to all teams. I would further argue that this openness would have to be advertised "openly and notoriously" such that all teams know of its existence.
There are also two things I want to point out as irrelevant in this determination early on: (1) the fact that Bluateam went on to win, and (2), the fact that the team disassembled the drivetrain again in the hotel in order for their actions to be more legal (because they still removed a functional working part of the robot and repaired/modified it outside of written time and implied space requirements). I don't believe there is any spatial rule that explicitly says parts of the robot cannot be taken out of the venue, but this is implied and/or stated strongly and repeatedly at every regional.
So, based on those determinations, there are only a few ways out of this being illegal. On the temporal side of the requirements I set forth, one could argue a different definition of "while participating in" from <R09>, but that is stretching it to ludicrous proportions. On the spatial side, one could argue that a precedent for removing parts from the Pit was set with equal opportunity offsite machining being allowed, but this is equally weak because it doesn't address the problem at hand directly and also goes utterly against what (at least I think) is the spirit of <R09>.This is
quite illegal.