[Kevin Sevcik]

So I see I've stumbled across the 2006 Season - We hate the upper goal thread.....

Seriously though. Dave just pointed out the ridiculously complicated design problem that is the center goal. It has to cushion shots, funnel balls, count balls, be easily assembled, be no taller than 10.5', be no wider than 6', not get in the way of human players, support a vision target, not be over balanced so it might fall over, not be prone to breakdowns, etc. etc. It's a terribly overconstrained problem. When you start adding in things like "not jam when 20 balls are fired at it in 10 seconds" you just can't do it. Mike says he's not confident enough in his engineering to propose an alternative design. I suspect there aren't many that would meet the design criteria.

Conveyors would breakdown (in the middle of a match) and genereate complaints of over complication. Increasing the depth of the goal would require additional supports that would have gotten in the way of human players. Lowering the goal's bottom would've impeded the team in the middle. Just look at the lengths hopper teams needed to go to to prevent jamming and see how hard it would be to adapt them to the goal.

The GDC does a heck of a job designing a game and field every year. I challenge anyone here that has a problem with the field to spend some time trying to design a game just for a Vex bot. I've done a simple one and it wasn't nearly as easy as I thought. Then work up fully dimensioned drawings and rules. If you want, email it all to me and I'll point out the glaring flaws I've decided I can see in it. Then multiply that by 10 time the size and 1000 teams and you might have a better grasp of the difficulties here. Personally, I don't know how the GDC manages to convince themselves to do it every year.

*Steps down from soapbox*

Ahem. Sooo... On to my actual criticisms and suggestions. I'll note that since I didn't attend nationals, I haven't thought about the game in long enough that I've forgotten most of my complaints. Which just goes to show how trivial most of them must have been.

Scoring software - Yeah, it's already been covered to death. More testing would be the easiest fix. I'm sure you can grab some mentors or students to punch numbers in during the first week or two of build season.

Field robustness - Yes, I'm probably contradicting myself. But the GDC should probably plan on the robots running full tilt into most field pieces, as I understand that was one of the issues with the camera.

Camera target - I have no idea what was going on, but our camera worked flawlessly on a practice field, but hated the on-field vision targets. Could we go back to the super free-form practice matches? Or have a camera calibration party on the field Thursday night after practice matches but before the pits close? Yes, I am assuming the camera makes a triumphant return. It's nifty enough that I think it'd be a good idea.

Spare parts - Bring back the Small Parts desk! LSR has a Spare Parts desk with nuts, bolts, pins, etc. It's funded by the regional, doesn't cost that much to restock every year, and helps lots. I humbly suggest that every regional needs one.

Practice field - Is there enough room on the trucks to ship official-style practice field components? The wooden replicas everyone ends up with are useful, but not as useful as an actual field.

AV - Possibly the video directors need to be clued in more about things. Watching alliance picking webcasts from nationals, some of the directors didn't know the alliance picking screens were available for about 10 minutes.

Music - I don't know where the DJs come from, but LSR had to listen to 15 minutes of 70's and 80's TV show themes on Saturday morning. I didn't really believe it until the campy Batman theme faded in. Thumbs up on starting Friday with Thunderstruck, however.

Umm.. and that's it. Overall the season went really well. No "gotcha" rule changes in between ship and the 1st regional, and no people getting knocked in the head with tetras, so we're obviously learning here. The scoring problems were understandably annoying, but I think these sorts of problems are being worked on and we've commenced beating compost that used to be a horse there.