What was more important- ramping or racking?
Seeing how there was only a few teams there who actually had their 2007 robot (and not their 2005 or a practice/prototype robot), there wasn't much scoring on the Rack. When our team went there today we didn't even have our manipulator mounted; all we did was drive around the field so I could practice driving.
At early events (Week 1, some Week 2), ramping will be more important than racking in many matches. But as the competition intensifies, expect racking to become just as important.
Generally speaking, how hard was it to get on the ramps?
Ummm, yeah. :-/ Generally, I would use the advice that one ramp bot != automatic 60 points. 30 points would seem feasible most of the time, but may ramps are not much bigger than the robots themselves, and with bumpers on a robot, ramps become even harder to climb up. Most teams who did ramp started doing so with around 30 seconds left in the game.
I imagine many matches weren't actually played with three per alliance, but did any teams get two robots up?
Actually, every match I saw had three robots playing against three robots. In one of our three qualification matches our alliance had 2 at 12".
Were teams having a difficult time scoring with defense being played on them, or was it nice and easy to sling 'em up regardless?
New England or not, this was a scrimmage event and more or less there wasn't any defense. All teams seemed like all they did on the playing field was test mechanisms and practice driving.
How about scoring on the opposite side of the rack? Did it happen? Easily?
From a driver's point of view, it looks like it would be a bit easier than I originally thought at the New Hampshire Kickoff event. But again, this was a scrimmage event and little scoring of any kind actually occured.
Were teams using the far side tubes, or entirely their own?
Human player tubes.
Grouping the past few questions, was there much cross-side mingling?
It was a scrimmage, so there wasn't too much or
anything that occurred.
But I didn't seem to have any problems zipping around the rack to the far side of the playing field and driving around all the other robots and tubes there. Granted, there were no serious attempts at defense, but it looks like fast, maneuverable robots will venture down to the far side of the field more often that slower ones.
Did the rack swing like crazy?
The rack definitely did move and swing, but it didn't seem to "swing like crazy". Again, when most matches had only a handful of tubes scored, there wasn't much robot+rack interaction.
Any cool auto-modes figured out yet? Was there anything?Team 230 has an almost keeper (it was about 50% onto the spider leg), but autonomous ended before they were able to score it. However, the current procedure for a partially scored tube seems to be pause the match, have a referee go out, and literally slash the tube to instantly remove it from game play without having to fiddle it off the robot and the rack.
How inflated did the tubes stay? Any tube carnage?
So far it doesn't seem to be that unreasonable. Deflated tubes seem to be about as common as broken tetras in Triple Play.
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Any other interesting tidbits would be cool to hear about. I wanna know how this game flows! Thanks guys!
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Defense
Defense will be important, but don't expect it to be as rampant as Aim High, as the referees are calling a lot of penalties. So far it looks like this game is going to play out like Triple [re]Play, so expect a lot of offense.
Also, don't underestimate getting from one side of the rack to the other. Even driving full speed from one side of the rack to the other (without any obstructions) can easily take 5-8 seconds. Just in the time it takes to get from one side of the rack to the other gives plenty of opportunity for offensive teams to "turn and burn" - e.g. get into the rack, score a ringer really quickly, and get back out before the defensive robot can get to you. Again, another Triple [re]Play phenomenon.
Offense
I guess I can file this under offense, but so far spoilers have remained virtually virtually untouched. But then again, teams were having enough problems just scoring ringers, let along descoring them. However, IMO, give teams time to get used to their manipulators, and you'll start seeing a lot more exciting action on the playing field.
CMUcam
Sorry, CMUcam, it looks like this isn't your year. While there were a ton of teams who had them on their robot last year, there are only a few who seem to be using it this year. Again, Triple [re]Play.
Ramp bot / Tube Bots
All in all, I was greatly surprised at the ratio of ramp bots to arm robots at the event, which was probably 30:70. I was expecting much closer to 50:50, especially since New England is legendary for it's defense. Most matches seemed to have one ramp bot in each alliance. And there wasn't that many "dedicated" ramp robots without an arm of some kind.