Quote:
Originally Posted by keen101
... i don't see that much of a problem with distinguishing the blue (empty) cells from the moon rocks (purple), becuase ... the empty cells are hung up near the middle players who have to sit in the seats. The seated players are surrounded by the moon rocks on the floor, but the empty cells are neatly hung up to help avoid confusion.
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True, but the staff (field reset crew, scorers, and refs) will also have problems doing their jobs, because they, too, will have trouble distinguishing the colors, especially after a few hours on the job when they're starting to get tired. I think the colors are going to be a nuisance for most participants.
I've been reading some of the suggestions for altering the colors of the balls. Dying synthetic fabrics is tricky; if the covers were cotton, it would be a cinch, but they're not cotton. Bleaching synthetic fabrics probably wouldn't work without damaging the fabric. Paint would get rubbed off (onto robots and playing field--yuck).
I believe that someone who was good with cutting tools could remove the blue fabric entirely from the empty cells. I'm guessing that the underlying strips are either black, white, or a similar neutral color. This would not involve a huge amount of work, but would probably change the appearance noticeably.
The drawback would be that the empty cells would weigh less--hey, that makes sense; shouldn't empty cells be really light weight?
. Their handling characteristics would also change. Handling characteristics and weight would also be affected if tape or lights were added, as some have suggested, or if a different color fabric were stitched over existing balls.
If the manufacturer supplies just these three colors, then the only choice FIRST has is:
--Stay with the inherent vision difficulties, or
--Cause a different kind of frustration with "homemade" alterations that might profoundly affect the robots' abilities to handle the game pieces.
(I suspect FIRST will not change anything about the game pieces; they have too much to do already.)
If your team could vote between vision problems and handling problems, which would you choose?