[Rob]

Dave,

I'm glad you are taking part in this thread, as someone involved in rules creation your input is valuable to all of us. You provided a sterling argument supproting collaboration and the way it mimicks real world situations.

Unfortunatley, I feel that you did not address the original point I was trying to bring forward in my post. I was not trying to once again debate whether teams should share resources, but whether it should be legal for clones to use one another as spare parts during competitions. Let me put forth an example:

Two teams collaborate during the build and make exactly identical robots called "Thing 1" and "Thing 2". Each manages their spare parts separately. They compete at various regionals and both end up competing at the Championship event, but end up in separate divisions. Both end up competing in the elimination rounds of their divisions. "Thing 2" is eliminated in the quarter finals, while "Thing 1" wins their division, but had to use up all of their 25 pounds of spare parts to stay working. Now I would like to pose 2 scenarios:

A) "Thing 1" takes the 25 pounds of spare parts from the eliminated "Thing 2" out to the Einstein feild to repair themselves between matches.

B) "Thing 2" leaves their eliminated machine on the Georgia Dome floor so that the pit crew of "Thing 1" may scavenge parts between matches on the Einstein feild.

In my interpretation of the current rules, both scenarios would violate rules R01, R16, R26, R29, and R46. In scenario "B" any parts taken would not fit the definitions of spare, replacement, or upgrade parts as defined in the manual.

My effort is to get a specific rule to address these two potential scenarios so that the aforementioned rules are not subject to interpretation or "gray areas".

The fact based argument against sharing parts in this way is clear in the rules per my interpretation. If my interpretation is wrong, please let me know. If it is correct, then we should introduce a rule specifically about these situations so that there is no temptation to falsely interpret the rules stated above.

Rob