[JesseK]

Think about common sense for a sec. Then take a deep breath.

I would play with the transmission. You need to learn what kinks there are in it so you can plan to work them out. You can also play with what the current speeds of the transmission 'feel' like so the driver has a better feel for driving the bot. These are all allowed and intended to be allowed during the preseason. As you can see on the forums, many teams already have drivable robots with the new control system on it. Speaking of which, doing so also allows you to experiment with pneumatic and servo control in the new control system.

Then disassemble and reassemble it during the build season. While it's apart, you'll have ample time to figure out how to solve any problems you encountered during testing. Note that if you modify anything, Eric has already pointed out that you'll have to get a new one of those things next year -- not necessarily the whole transmission...common sense seems to dictate the intent of the rule here. As an example, this offseason we had to file down a roll pin on the dog gear because it was hitting an output stage gear. In the build season, should we choose to use the same transmissions, we will modify a 2007 KOP transmission roll pin in the same manner and reassemble the transmission it goes in. We already had the intent to rebuild the transmission Jan 3rd anyways so that we could replace bearings and properly lubricate the gears.

I'd also like to note that our AM super shifters came fully assembled last year; so I believe the whole argument for assembled vs dissembled COTS product usage has controvertible evidence either way.

In the end, it will be the 2009 rules that state whether or not we may be able to use previous years' COTS components.