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Originally Posted by indieFan
Wait a second. You all mean to tell me that you expect to have a specific soccer ball available to you?
Isn't this just another part of the engineering problem?
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Let's run with that question: is it supposed to be part of the engineering problem? If that was the idea, why wouldn't FIRST have just said so in the manual, instead of risking the wrath of the teams (again)? Also, FIRST rightly goes to a lot of trouble to publish specifics about the rest of the field—what indication do we have that they intended to make the balls' characteristics difficult to ascertain (by choosing a supplier with limited stock)? And if it was intentional, it would make for a ridiculous policy—isn't the whole point of using soccer balls to take advantage of their ubiquity? (You stand a very good chance of finding a substitute
provided that you can get one of the official balls as a basis for comparison.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by indieFan
And, in my opinion, if you are designing for a single specific soccer ball, you are being too narrow minded in your design. The manual even states that the "...color and surface may vary." Are you going to deflate your ball to various pressures during testing? Are you going to scuff parts of the ball up during testing? While you could, you probably won't.
Just expand your design to cover a range of possibilities and you'll be fine. If required, test one of the smooth, rubber, non-stitched soccer balls like the ones used in Phys. Ed. and one that is a quality competition, stitched soccer ball. If both work, you're design is robust enough to handle any type of soccer ball thrown at it.
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What's the point of testing with vastly dissimilar materials? On the playing field, you're just as likely to encounter a bowling ball as a one-piece rubber soccer ball. Can you even be sure that any of the data you collect with a rubber ball is useful?
If all you've got are balls of the wrong type, then feel free to make use of them, fully cognizant of their limitations—but the whole point of this exercise is to find the ones that FIRST specified, in order to optimize the design for real-world operation.
And yes, real-world operation certainly involves scuffed, dirty and/or semi-inflated balls. I would definitely expect to see some of those on the real field, so if I was interested in my design's performance under those conditions, of course I would test them. (Although, for some designs, it might be sufficient to presume that it just won't work for those balls, and ignore the problem.)