[meaubry]

When collaboration started pandoras box was opened for a wide variety of concerns.
My take on this subject goes like this -
I love seeing teams "help" each other - it builds and bonds and makes everyone feel good.
But, each team individually should account for the 25 lbs and also meeting the intent of the rules as written.
The best thing that could happen is to eliminate many of the rules that lawyering or being "smart", causes this kind of controversial debate - obviously the rules are NOT clear or else the majority of the teams just aren't "that smart".
Sorry - I got off track for a second there.
Back to the topic at hand - Teams should NOT be allowed to swap complete mechanisms with other teams, but - parts and raw material are completely okay in my mind.
Even if the interface is designed through collaborative efforts, each TEAM is responsible for their own robot. The mechanism was designed for a single teams application - yes, I realize that many teams could swap many mechanisms and they would work just fine - but, why is that okay??
6 weeks - one robot (defined as the sum of the mechanisms manufactured and assembled to function as a single machine).
The single simple rule should be - if the mechanism is designed and built by your team, it should remain ONLY on your teams robot.
As far as the rules go - sometimes less is more.
Good discussion - lets not allow this one to degrade though, everyone should respect the fact that each person should be allowed to state their feelings and sometimes we all just need to agree to disagree.