Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
That's specious reasoning at best. That's like saying that a person driving down a 2 lane highway at night is perfectly within their right to leave their super extra blindness inducing high beams on when passing another car because, hey, the other car can always pull to the side of the road and stop driving. It's certainly true, but it misses the point entirely that the rude driver is causing the problem in the first place and shouldn't be depending on the other driver to make up for his lack of caution.
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If you're faced with an oncoming car in your lane, while it might be the other driver's fault, it's very much your problem as well. Obliviously going about your merry way makes you as careless as the other driver is reckless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
Honestly, if you think safety is everyone's responsibility but your own....
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The point is exactly the converse of that: both teams are contributing (though not necessarily equally) to the purportedly unsafe situation, and both are able to act to prevent it. Paradoxically, the blue team's motion is only uncontrolled if the blue team chooses to operate their robot when they can't see it.
But maybe there's a better question: if operating a robot outside the driver's view is
a priori unsafe, why were the 2002 and 2003 games designed to make this a common occurance? (Similar versions of <S01> existed then.) In 2002, robots frequently got lost behind one or more goals. In 2003, a robot passing under the bar was temporarily obscured by the ramp, from the point of view of a driver in the furthest alliance station—to say nothing of the 8 ft × 16 ft wall of opaque boxes in the centre of the field. What about the rack this year? How difficult is it to see through that thing, when it's almost full? If a robot is positioned with a full rack between it and its drivers, and they can't see the robot, did they just cause themselves to lose control, in violation of <S01>?
I don't doubt that this behaviour is a bit unsportsmanlike, but it doesn't seem fair to use the strongest safety rule to enforce a penalty that seems targeted at a gameplay event that is not necessarily, and not gravely unsafe.