[archiver]

Posted by Brandon Heller at 04/22/2001 1:29 AM EST


Student on team #449, Blair Blazers, from Montgomery Blair High School and NASA Goddard, Sigma Space.


In Reply to: What's so great about defense?
Posted by Kevin Sevcik on 04/20/2001 12:17 AM EST:



I can see where both sides on this issue are coming from. Cases in point:

AGAINST defense-
I remember one match in '00 on the Einstein field where an alliance of two decent ball-depositing bots was up against a wedge and a bar-grabbing robot. At the start of the match, the wedge immediately set its sights upon a tall robot in the process of depositing balls. The wedge robot just drove into the other one, and knocked it over, full of balls. The other robot on the decent alliance had gone over the ramp to the end of the field to get balls. Wedge-bot went straight for it, and the same thing happened. With a minute remaining, two robots were lying on the field disabled, while the other two simply stayed on the ramp for the remainder of it. Bor-ing! What happened in the end? The wedge-bot alliance was disqualified, netting both teams a score of zero. That kind of match is DEFINITELY not in the spirit of FIRST. It was these cheap tactics that hurt everyone in last year's game. Robots that were built during a regional would sometimes disable robots with vastly more engineering time put into them.

FOR defense-
The element of defense to last year's game added a level of excitement to each match that was unequalled by this year's game. Near the end of most matches, the ramp would be occupied by three teams, and one would struggle to get on. When they did, at the last second, the crowd cheered wildly, and the entire match outcome could have changed. A match like this earned my team the Play of the Day award at last year's VCU regional.
Defense forces a robot to be built with durability in mind. Last year, 100lbs of my team's robot was in the base, with each wheel tipping the scales at 10lbs. In a few matches, we actually broke other robots by driving over them, unintentionally of course! ;-)

my position:
Bring back the defense. If FIRST wants to be on national television, and truly expand, the excitement level of the game must match that of current sports. The rules from last year worked out pretty well with the defense, and wedges (or annoy-bots as we used to call them) were the exceptions. One could make the argument that if your robot was knocked over and couldn't get up, it was the result of a design flaw. Team 67's '00 robot, Hotbot, had linkages that would let it get up from nearly any position, and this ability helped it greatly in competition. Defense added more excitement than it lost in cheesy matches.

Bring defense back!

Brandon, team 449

p.s. My vote would actually be for 3v3 next year. Would be soooo much more fun....