Quote:
Originally Posted by Zflash
The grass is plenty green on this side
-I am meerly stating a possible advantage for MI teams if a teams goal is to be better prepared for the World Championships. One definite advantage that an MI team has that I can see at the moment unless something changes is the shipping aspect. On the last build day our team and many others are putting the robot in the crate ready or not because FEDex is going to show up between 11:00 and 5:00. Mi teams will be able to work later untill a FIRST MI rep shows up to watch them put it in a bag and seal it.
Disclaimer: I realize that this is a pilot and things can change.
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I think the point of trying something new is to make it "better" overall. If it was perfectly equitable in all aspects, then why go through the work and risk/chaos of making a change. Overall the hope is that this will be a net positive that it will have some sort of national (and/or international) scalability.
The FEDex advantage for MI teams is intentional in that they are trying something new. Ever since shipping started, there were inherent in-equalities and additional hassles towards shipping. (For instance California is 3 hours behind EST and therefore has 3 more hours from the launch of the game than any EST team). My estimates have over 100 tons of excess freight going around the country. My team is persnoally responsible for 250 pounds of crate weight shipped over 1000 miles during a season.
Recognizing these "advantages" is a good thing as these are the positive aspects that will hopefully outweigh the negatives of the system they are piloting.
Recognizing the "disadvantages" is a good thing as these are either areas for improvement or items that will have to be thrown into the equation of whether or not this system is a net positive worth the efforts associated with change.
One really big disadvantage for MI teams that I haven't seen in this thread is a lot of key mentors applying a ton of personal time trying to figure out a better system for FIRST instead of trying to figure out how to build a better Chassis, manipulator, Chairman's award submission....
So will MI teams have an net advantage in 2009? I certainly hope so. Will these advantages be applicable to others in th future? That's the goal. FIRST is a really really good thing. Some feel that it can be great. Calculated experimentation with improvements is one route to greatness. What can everyone do? Stop worrying about the "fairness" of 2009 and continue working on making FIRST the best it can be. For those of you outside of MI, but near a district event check it out and provide constructive criticism or better yet help out. If you are reasonably close, come check out the State Championship. It should have the quality of play that we all can be proud of.
EDIT/Apology: It was brought to my attention that my comments may be veiwed differently than I intended. I will leave the body as is as an example. My intentions were to keep a constructive (positive and negative) dialogue coninuing as opposed to destructive comments. After re-reading Dave's original post and some help from others I repect, I realize that negative comments are of value because they are what some may think about this situation (which is what this thread is about).