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Originally Posted by billbo911
Trying to interpret a rule as it was intended may be more difficult than first glance would lead you to believe.
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This rule was intended simply to make it hard on teams that send parts out to be fabricated. It keeps a team from subcontracting out (or buying off-the-shelf) their robot (and for that matter, their student's inspiration).
The actual dollar value they used is arbitrary. $3500 isn't any better or worse than $4000 or $3000, but they needed a number, and that's the one we got. Furthermore, whether a specific item is worth $200 or $400 isn't important, as long as we all use the same way of pricing it. It seems silly to me that, in the situation I laid out above, a team could make their robot cheaper by adding a pound of stuff to it, but that's the rule as it's written.
Exercises like this (YMTC) are great for seeing precisely where the lines will be drawn in practice, so that we all play by the same rules. They can help us see a side of a situation that we might not have considered (like Jack's post above). They're also useful to find situations like the one I outlined above, where the rule as it's written doesn't seem to make perfect sense.