Originally Posted by EricH

I am. And it's legit. The shipping deadline, if you had read the rules that closely (I admit, it's hard to when you have a robot to build), you would have found that the ship deadline is called out as being local time. So, let's say the deadline is 5:00 PM local time. East Coast, 5:00 PM rolls around, and all the robots are out of team hands. West Coast, it's still 2:00 PM. Teams are just starting to load crates then... or else they're squeezing in practice or adding that manipulator. That's a built-in 3-hour difference.

Now, the East Coast teams learn at, say, 10:00 AM local. The West Coast teams learn at 7:00 AM local--3 hours earlier local time (or, local +3, if you so prefer, for the East Coast). So, you have 7-10 AM on Kickoff (3 hours). You then have 2-5 PM on Ship Date (3 hours). That's the local time that the West Coast teams have the game/the robot that East Coast teams don't have during the same timeframe. Guess what? 3+3=6. It's still 6 hours.

So, under realtime conditions, you're right, it's 3 hours. However, under LOCAL conditions (and who doesn't stay in their area during robotics? It's not like there's anything else to do.), it's double that due to time zone differences. And local time makes all the difference.