[Doug G]

Originally Posted by Arefin Bari

Personally, I think some shooting robots will have an advantage. I have no idea what inspectors have in their mind as a "safe shooter," but I guess we will find that out as the regionals roll by. As said above, a whole update was released on just shooters; I am sure FIRST/GDC has thought this out throughly before permitting shooting robots. The only thing you need to worry about is your robot and how it is going to react when there is a 8 lbs 40" in diameter ball flying at your machine.

Lately I've been giving this a lot of thought... we have a simple arm bot with a forklift that without a traffic jam, can hurdle about 3 times a match. But another useful (maybe not wise) strategy is to park our robot with it's forklift up in front of the opponent's overpass. As long as we don't impede a robot - it seems perfectly legal to block a "shooter's" ball launch. The down side is the force with which the ball may hit our robot may not be healthy for our robot. But let's just say we try this, maybe in the elim's and the opponents ball hits our forklift section and pops (this happen just this way at a scrimmage already). Now the opponent is left with just one ball. Is the ball popping intentional? It's not like we built daggers on our forklift, but the force the ball hits with makes it very vunerable to an exposed screw or bolt (which is how a ball popped on us at the scrimmage).