[Kevin Sevcik]

Ricksta,

The whole point is that as soon as you start playing with the intention of preventing the other drivers from seeing where they're going, you're playing the drivers, not the robots. There's a reason FIRST disallows things like sirens and blindingly bright headlights. Your robot is supposed to be playing against the other robots on the field, not the drivers. Nitpicking about location and number of robots is silly. Were I a ref, I'd DQ a team doing this anywhere on the field. Otherwise you're saying it's okay if they're 1 foot from the diamond plate. or maybe 2 feet. No wait, maybe it's only an inch. There's literally no way you could make that stance make sense.

Similarly, if I saw 2 alliance mates blocking the entire vision of the rack, I'd DQ both teams. In my book it's an illegal strategy no mater how you go about it. You're supposed to be playing the robots on the field, not taking advantage of the fact that FIRST has given you a row of sitting ducks on the opposite end of the field. Honestly, wouldn't you be terrified if FIRST made this legal? Do you know how easy it would be to make a robot that could effectively block vision of the entire field? My students could whip one up in 2 days. Once your robot was on the wrong side of the field, you'd be hard pressed to get it back in a safe manner to move the offending blinder-bot too.

I think it just comes down to fairness. Theoretically, a team can design a robot to counter just about anything your robot can do to it on the field. But with the lack of driver aids and the fact that drivers are stuck in one spot, there's virtually nothing a team can do about being blinded by this robot. It simply isn't fair to force a team to sit there and tell them there's absolutely nothing they can do about the giant annoying robot keeping them from even attempting to drive their own robot.