[Tom Line]

We had the shooter concept in 2 days. The chassis in 4. Just today we had a major breakthrough on a simple way to hang and we're cadding it to check feasibility. We've spent time in every meeting so far discussing hanging.

I believe the difficulty hanging is disproportionate to the returns. Consider that if you didn't hang for those 20 seconds, you could probably get 1 more ball in the goal, rendering the hanging only really worth 1 point. Consider if non of your bots could hang, you could potential score 2 or 3 balls in that 20 seconds. Perhaps matches will be decided by a couple points, but this is NOTHING like 2007 where a single bot with a good ramp system could win 80% of it's seeding matches just by virtue of having those ramps.

Finally, the difficultly of suspending means that I doubt very many matches will see robots suspended. Even if they do manage to suspend, that extra 1 point *probably* won't be all that important: I certainly would not make it a design priority.

I look forward to someone building a bot specifically for the finale - there are ways to do it (twin ramps, lifting the other 2 robots on your team, etc). That bot could be a very valuable asset, but I don't think it's a game breaker like a good ramp bot was in '07.