[archiver]

Posted by Joe Johnson.   [PICTURE: SAME | NEW | HELP]


Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.

Posted on 3/1/2000 5:01 AM MST


In Reply to: 130lbs to 140lbs. posted by Anton Abaya on 2/29/2000 10:07 PM MST:



Anton,

If you made your plea in the first week or two you maybe had a chance of getting a favorable ruling, but at this point it is a virtual mathmatical certainty that FIRST will not change the rule.

If you think about it from FIRST's perspective, you may even agree with them.

Your team needs the weight. But it could have been that your team NEEDED the weight 2 or 3 weeks ago and in order to comply with the weight requirements your team made some tough choices to get 10 lbs out of your machine.

Perhaps you spent 3 days of potential driving time to make 'speed holes' in your robot OR perhaps you took off (or more likely, never fully completed) a mechanism that you would have liked to have but could use if you were going to make weight OR perhaps you made serious reliability trade offs on several systems in order to make weight.

Regardless of what you did to make weight, done is done and you cannot easily get the drive time OR the mechanism OR the reliabiltity or whatever back.

If your team had really made those tough choices would you then be such a strong advocate of FIRST allowing other teams to avoid having to make those same hard choices?

I think that, at this point, fairness requires that FIRST keep the weight limit right where it is.

Joe J.