[PhilBot]

I really enjoyed the Chesapeake Regional. The finals had some great high (in both senses of the word) scoring allianaces playing together. It was a blast.

However, I'm still confused about the whole inspection schedule.

In Annapolis they were saying that you had to be inspected by the end of Thursday if you wanted to compete.

However, when we started queing for our first seed match on Friday (match 9) one of our alliance parners still didn't have their inspection sticker so they didn't turn up.

What's the point of having an inspection deadline if un-inspected teams will still be included in the next morning's match rotations anyway.

It seems to me that if a team misses their inspection deadline on Thursday, they should NOT be included in the match rotations the next morning.

This may sound a bit brutal, but the game WAS structured such that an alliance REQUIRED at least two robots to score bonus points. Only starting out with two robots (or even one) makes it really hard to compete against a full opposing alliance.

Maybe there could be some extra slots added later in the day for Late Inspections.

I'm just trying to think up ways to eliminate having to explain how "Life isn't always fair" to the kids.

Phil.