[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Billfred

I agree, but to be legal, you'd have to be ready to make and ship transmissions to all the teams in FIRST in short order. Either you're going to have to have a lot of machining capacity, or you're going to have to build a few hundred transmissions. Neither particularly sounds like it's worth the trouble.

(But hey, if someone wants to go through the trouble of creating a legit business (and the other requirements for a FIRST-legal supplier under the most recent rule set), I don't see the trouble.)

I think that's quite akin to the homologation rules that you find (or used to find) in stock-car racing series. Those rules specified that manufacturers had to produce and offer for sale a certain number of examples of the car that would compete. Often 50 or more. Teams and manufacturers tried every conceivable way to bend the rules, for the same reasons. For example, they would build enough parts for 50 cars, but not assemble them—and were rejected.

So, what if FIRST introduced a homologation rule? Build and offer for sale a certain number of examples, and you can do your fabrication in batches. Something tells me that that would further tip the balance squarely in favour of the teams with the best funding or resources (who can afford to buy expensive components off-the-shelf, or commit resources to a production run). Maybe that's not really what we want to see—it would be as if teams had to either buy into one of the prebuilt designs to realize the significant savings in time and labour, but at the same time, they would be diminishing the amount of engineering that they do on their own. That's probably shifting the balance too far in favour of kit-built robots, as opposed to scratch-built ones.

As for the situation Steve referred to, it's illegal, but I think that his intention was to release them to the team on Wednesday after the kickoff to make up for the time that it would have taken, had the machining been started on the Saturday of the kickoff. The rules don't allow for that solution, even though it's roughly equivalent. And I say roughly, because a team could order one batch of parts with half to be held in reserve, but reject that batch on the basis of the half that they use as a prototype. Then they could repeat that cycle as many times as necessary, each time always having enough parts for the real robot ready. Furthermore, it would allow a team to avoid the delays imposed upon them by their sponsor's schedule—there's no special consideration in the rules for a sponsor being unable to maintain their committments.