Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
More fields=more radio channels, more space, more game pieces, more vounteers (including the specialised and skilled volunteers such as head refs, FTAs, etc.), less time to repair your robots, etc.
As it is, it takes a minimum of 20 matches to win the championship event (7 qualification, 6 divisional elims, 4 Einstein elims). Adding more spells problems for ANY robot, especially after the wear and tear of regionals beforehand.
Any veteran team will tell you, sucess recquires ALOT more than just a good robot too. Scouting is a key factor, especially in detemining your elimination partners. Marketing, in being able to get the elimination partners you want. A top notch pit crew, in keeping your robot running.
And finally, more matches would mean more time travelling between the dome and the pits, which is long enough as it is. Unlike regionals, where the robot will leave the pits for about 10-15 minuets, and sometimes as few as 6 or 7 if you cut it close, around each match, it can take almost a half hour before your robot returns to the pits from a match during championship (counting the time it leaves both before and after the match). More matches would mean almost no time to repair your bot.
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Our team has a philosophy that says every student gets to touch the bot. Whenever we ship the bot at least half of them know the robot in and out. Out of that the drives know the most about the bot and the job of the lead of each system kind of tells the drivers what to look for if errors happen etc etc. In most situations our drivers can take care of almost anything they need to from re-crimping a lead all the way to re-wrapping a wire. In the past year I only remember changes happening in the pit when we had enough time to.
I believe that if every team educated their drivers about their robots, than it would be much easier. I think it is crucial for the drivers (including the human player) that are on the field with the robot the most, know how to fix the most basic robot adjustments. That being said I believe the second part of your argument is flawed due to the lack of experience of the average drivers (from what you said), so now I get to make my argument.
I think that it is perfectly reasonable to add the new fields if any. I think one more would be prime and that Einstein would take a little longer but possible nonetheless. I think that even though it would take a little bit longer that it could make more matches more
Since USUALLY most repairs are minor, that if our teams trained our drivers during or after the break and that the drivers could do most of the simple stuff than it would be MUCH more possible to make more matches.
EDIT: To help with the scouting issue, at the LSR there was a scouting database. If we assigned a few people from teams than we could EASILY team up with very accurate scouting information. It would be just as easy and for the teams with more than 7 people, (6 for watching matches and one scribe compiling all of the data on a computer), to spare it would be a breeze for more accurate scouting.
Pavan.