Heh, a definite revamp of our moonrock output mechanism is in order for us before Atlanta. I would say that gravity feeding is plenty fast, so long as the balls do not jam themselves up. It's not as fast as, say, 2 FP's geared properly but it sure is a lot less weight. Also, it seems that shooters that fire downward seem to do better than arched or horizontal shooters.
Hmm, I strongly disagree with Paul regarding the small things when it comes to Qualification matches. Strategy execution in qualifications is too dependent upon luck and the alliance partners... sure one's own team can execute but perhaps the alliance partners simply can't do what Paul has described. I can only speak from my own experience on the field.
Many times at regionals, our alliance simply couldn't match our opponents capabilities offensively, so we'd discuss a strategy around human players. Sometimes, autonomous left us in with such terrible field position (or even worse, bots were already pinned against the wall with terrible field position) that it became very difficult to mount a comeback. For qualifications, we couldn't expect to dictate to our alliance anything and have it actually happen, even with the simple things and with veteran teams (
Match 47 -- Team #25 scores ~10 balls into their alliance partner's trailer during autonomous). I can't count the number of matches where our alliance came up with a strategy, we began executing the strategy, then for whatever reason the alliance partners deviated, failed to come through or kept getting in the way. Maybe it had to do with luck, or the opponents' counter-strategies, or ... whatever. It was nonetheless extremely difficult to fend for our self when that happened since our bot isn't a strong scorer as an arched shooter, which makes the little things moot and a 'dumper vs shooter' trade study perfectly necessary when doing scenarios & design at the beginning of the season. I wish we could have had more forethought into this during weeks 1, 2, & 3. To be honest we ran at 100% this build season and I have no regrets about it; we will simply upgrade for Atlanta.
Now, for eliminations I agree with Paul ... in elims, I agree that 'shooter vs dumper' doesn't matter so long as the moonrocks go into the opponents' trailers faster than the alliance's. Actually I think we need to examine 'what strategy when' type situations. Sure, it will get complicated, but it's better to be shared than to not. Even the FTC students on our team who have barely seen the FRC game have come up with some creative and effective solutions when asked. For example, when your primary scorer has a catastrophic scoring mechanism failure 30 seconds into a match, what do you do? We did 3 empty cells in a match when we were only supposed to do 1, while the broken team swapped roles with us and played defense (though all three super cells missed their targets thereby losing us the match ... heh).
Food for thought I guess.