[Rich Ross]

A few things.
1. Tape is prohibited because FIRST doesn't want to backslide. Letting us use tape for something besides insulation will lead to the eventual construction of robots held together by little more than duct tape and zip ties as opposed to nuts and bolts. If you want to use grippy material, find something that is pretty much the same, but is not described as tape. We used "safety tread" and passed inspection, and it was virtually the same as grip tape except in name.

2. If your robot falls over, hit the e-stop. Doesn't that solve the problem?

3. Multiple tube containment would be ridiculous. The reason FIRST eliminated this is for many reasons, but here are what i think are the primary ones.
A) When people can store something like 10 tubes, it broadens the gap between rookies and veterans.
B) The game isn't about making a storage device, its about either scoring, playing D, and/or ramping/lifting.
C)when people store tubes, its BORING for a long time. In 2005, watching teams (like 868, 469, 279, 71, and countless others) sit there, driving in and out of the loading zone so they could fill up with a ton of tetras. This is not fun for spectators. It does result in a little more excitement at the end (arguably) but it lowers the total energy in the arena.

My least favorite rule is regarding timeouts. From the end of a match, you have 4 minutes (at least) until your next match, but only 2 minutes to call a timeout. WE ran into a problem where 302 would have liked to call a timeout, but the referees would not let us call it. We complied, and i think the refs gave us a little bit longer to fix it, but 703, who also did not call a timeout, took about 8-10 minutes (their drive was broken to some extent and needed to be fixed). In the finals, You need to let teams fix their robots. watching a team lose because they couldn't replace a chain was silly, and the rule should have been enforced (even if that meant that 302 and 703 couldn't play).