First of all, a big welcome to you and the other New Zealand teams. It is great to have you on board and a very exciting step for all of us to see another nation joining FRC. While our team is not quite as geographically removed from the majority of FRC teams as you are, we certainly felt that way in our rookie year. As the first FRC team in Western Canada (and at that time completely clueless about Chief Delphi and the thriving FRC community just a few hours south in Seattle), the very first time we saw an FRC 'bot (other than the one we built) was on the first day of the Greater Toronto Regional.
One thing to watch for, from a team building perspective, is that if a team were to send you an old robot, you would have to invest some time in learning the old control system... not a bad thing, per se, but not as useful as learning about the new control system. It is my understanding that the new FTC control system (which should be considerably less expensive to ship than an FRC 'bot) would serve as a better model for learning about FRC robot control and programming. The new FTC kits are available now.
There are several ways to show people about the competition you will be involved in without neccesarily shipping a robot all the way across the pacific. Numerous videos are on youtube (my page is
www.youtube.com/dtengineering), team websites (my team is
www.trobotics.ca), the
FIRST web site, and of course,
www.thebluealliance.net
I also highly, HIGHLY recommend the two "FIRST Robots: Behind the Design" books by Vince Wilczynski and Stephanie Slezycki (Rockport Publishers). In fact these books are "must read" materials for any rookie team. You can probably gain the equivalent of about two years' worth of FRC experience just from reading those two books.
But I do understand how having "the real thing" present can not only help non-team members to begin to grasp the magnitude of the challenge you have undertaken, but also help your team and neighbouring teams... many of whom have not seen an FRC bot in person... get an idea of what these things are actually like. It would be a big sacrifice... perhaps emotional as much as financial... for a team to give up an old robot, but it would definitely be for a good cause. In fact it would be great to find a way to get a few different robots from different games "down under".
Jason