Quote:
Originally Posted by gorrilla
actually it wouldent be that hard just make a square and fill it with water and draining wouldent be a problem because most arenas have drains in the floor
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Lets talk semantics...
6' x 24' x 48' aquarium holds exactly 6912 feet cubed of water. That equals about 52,000 gallons of water. Your standard water hose does about 10 gallons per minute. So lets say one hose is to fill that giant cube? It would take it 5,200 minutes, or about 3 days.
So lets say we were to bring in a firetruck hose and tapped into an emergency fire hydrant sorce. It would take just about 70 minutes to fill that cube. That cube would then weigh 182 tons. Thats a lot of water.
Now the field must be deconstructable, because you have to move the field from regional to regional. To make this aquarium you can't just bolt 1" thick plexi together. You'd have to glue it, so it wouldn't be reusable. The price of the playing field would be incredible to have to buy 48' x 6' and 24' x 6' sheets, especially plexi thick enough to support 182 tons of water. And not just buy 8 or so of those, but by a whole new aquarium per regional to glue together.
A water game is just too expensive for FIRST to be doing. That is, unless they shrunk the field back to 1993 proportions and made the bots 12" x 12"
Also making a waterproof bot is an INCREDIBLY daunting task for any FIRST team to be doing. To make an ROV that is lets say 26" x 36" would be getting into tens of thousands of dollars. ROV's are incredibly expensive to make and maintain, especially those that are designed to do a task, even those as simple as picking stuff up. We can create rolling robots that can pick up giant balls and shoot them for under a thousand dollars, to be picking up something as small as jewelry with a large ROV could cost a team easily over 10,000 dollars.
Of course you can always make a boat type game, which would take away the 3d aspect of a watergame. But if you are going to do a boating game, then why not just play the same thing on land? Cheaper to build the field, easier to build the field, less mess, less cost for the teams and FIRST.