[StephLee]

It's never impossible to build a robust robot. We honestly have not had anything break so far (and now I've probably jinxed us for Chesapeake...); we use bumpers, we have no trouble up the ramp, and we were at 117.3 at last check. We have a shooter, a conveyor, and a dump, as well as pneumatics to run the shooter and dump. Granted, we are using two small CIMs, but something had to go.

Maybe the weight limit could have been different this year, but I think the reason FIRST made it hard to do everything was that they were aiming for a wide variety of designs. Last year, bascially everyone did the same thing. They did it very differently, but still the same thing. There were a few low scorers, but very few that I saw. This year, you have a very few purely defensive bots; bots with dumps and great defense; bots with average defense and good dumps; bots with average defense and good shooting; bots with average defense and good dumping and shooting; I could go on. The point is, this year's game seems to have been designed to allow for a wider variety of functions. To me, that makes the game a good bit more spectator-friendly. One match you see great dumping, then great defense, then great shooting. It's harder to get bored, if you ask me.