I certainly agree that organizing pre-ship inspections would be worthwhile.
Catching major wiring issues, mechanical problems, size/weight overages, bumper illegalities, are all solveable at home.
However, I must say I like the work on Thursday's and think of it as an integral part of the engineering process. It's a final review and rework by peer engineers. We get 11 matches for a field of 47 teams at SBPLI, but we only deal with 3 or 4 rookies each year. You have a much larger problem to overcome in Seattle.
I inspected a half dozen robots before shipping last season and caught quite a few issues that were easy to fix and work around at home. All the local rookies and rookie-veterans get visits and several others request inspections. It's on a volunteer basis though, and it's a lot easier for one inspector to travel between teams, than for all teams to bring a robot and pit crew to give up hours organizing a road trip to a central location.
I do think "required" is too strong a stance, and having a fixed date is not workable. Possibly, calling it a deadline date would make it doable.
I think the date must be flexible, because:
- Many of our teams, here at least, are forced by a school break to usually ship the Friday before that final Saturday. The one year out of 4 that they aren't forced to ship early, they lose 9 days of build time instead (except for the ones who come live with us for a week).
- Limited number of inspectors, large number of teams, team meeting times, distance to cover - all would force inspections to be carried out over the whole last week I think.
Other issues to resolve:
-- Teams that need help the most never think they have an issue ahead of time. I find it easier to just show up.
-- Pre-ship party won't pull in all the teams that need to be inspected, especially, the under-mentored ones who won't easily be able to transport their robot. Remote teams probably need to be visited.
-- A traveling scale will catch gross over weight problems, but could still be 5 lbs off from the official Regional scale.
-- Drastic size problems could be identified, but without a sizing box many teams will resort to a wait and see attitude if it's close.