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Originally Posted by EStokely
4) Have published penalties for breaking the rules. A robot found to be over weight should lose the matches they competed in, even if its retroactive (IMHO) As to which matches I think a case could be made for any "Suspected matches" i.e. any matches between weigh ins.
Harsh? yep. but it is the teams responsibility to keep their weight in spec. If you alter the machine you need to reweigh. That's pretty straight forward.
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This is the problem you run in to. If you just say "suspected matches" and leave it for someone to determine, then you're putting a lot of gray area in there. If you're saying since they were last weighed... Well a team is likely to be weighed once at inspection and maybe once at your random inspection. And if you're an ounce over weight and lose half of your matches cause someone left a wrench on the robot.... Well that's not fun.
As for reweighing after every robot change... That'd keep inspection hopping the entire weekend. Not to mention teams missing matches cause they're in line to get re-weighed after a simple change.
Plus, this ignores other re-inspection issues like swapping 40 amp breakers for 50, or any of a hundred other nefarious changes an ill-intentioned team can pull.
Basically, I think any hard and fast rules about this are much more likely to horribly punish teams that mean well and accidentally end up a pound over after a weekend of wrestling with a robot. They're not likely to deter the theoretical (and likely few) teams that intetionally go out there and break the rules for an advantage.