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Originally Posted by efoote868
Um, getting the speed is very unlikely on the field... you'd need room to accellerate. And, with the mecanum drive train 868 developed this year, i'd be surprised to see much of any robot out race it
(  not to brag or boast... it even got us in trouble once, in auton, the programmers screwed up, and instead of going in our intended pattern, we got the switch construct wrong and instead went forward full speed... took us about 3 seconds to get from the furthest back square, to the opposite sides wall. We hit it so hard that it knocked the controllers off the shelf, the controller went so far it hit the knees of the other drivers...  ) |
For ramming balls into a goal using a rubber skirt as a bumper... it might just work and would be able to attain speeds much higher than most of the bots on the field just on principle that it lacks significant amounts of friction.
Can you imagine that thing anchoring down to shoot though O_o
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more relevent, a hovercraft isn't realistic because to get it floating, and keep it floating, you'd need a heck of alot of air... and i'm pretty sure that'd drain your batteries too quickly
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBus...tation_Machine
We never quite got to test the actual design, but a hovercraft not required to jump hoops and speed over rocky ground might have been reasonable depending on what we were using.
Apparently, not much air is required to pass through the skirt to keep it on some form of cushion of air. Preferably, we would want a skirt that would drag along the ground under the bot somewhat to prevent the skirts from turning and would also require less air to keep the skirts inflated.
The two that Adam and Jamie built used vacuum cleaner motors to keep the design levitating. Hovercraft should, in theory, be lighter than a robot with a drivetrain and wheels and perhaps could have more efficiently used higher rpm motors such as those used for fans.
At a minimum, it would have been nice if we could have actually tested our designs.