Actually, our robot used to be a turreted shooter. Over the course of the build season, we all were planning on having a turreted shooter. As a programmer, I know that a lot of my time was dedicated to programming the turret and making it work. Despite frequent jamming problems stemming from the fact that we were trying to funnel the balls from our triple wide ball collector to our narrow ball silo, when we bagged the 'bot at the end of the build season it was still a turreted shooter.
I personally thought we would have a bad year this year, similar to 2006. (Gasp!
)
After a couple meetings, we decided that we should use the Robot Access Period before Cass Tech to get rid of the turret and widen the silo so it could fit two balls side by side. We did this very efficiently by using basically the exact same parts, only twice as wide. After we did this, the robot worked wonderfully.
That is also the reason we have a pretty unique design, with a hopper in the front and a fixed double wide spitter in the back. I've only recognized one other team (228) with this design.