[dtengineering]

Hi folks,

Let's tone this down a bit.

As pointed out above, the teams that saw an opportunity to withold a lightweight robot and possibly do so within the rules, asked for clarification in the Q&A, just as they were supposed to.

The question that was asked was very clear. The answer, unfortunately, was not. Based on the "what goes in the witholding allowance is up to you" answer, I honestly thought that it was okay to bring a lightweight robot to the competition with you... and I thought it was a really good answer.

So I have empathy for the teams who honestly believed that this was the intent of the answer. I know I did! The tradeoff of a light weight robot for increased build time struck me as a fair and reasonable engineering decision for a team to make.

I also have empathy for FIRST and the GDC, who attempt to answer questions quickly, and in the best interests of all involved with FIRST. Looking back, I am sure they wish they had included the "but you must ship a robot" clarification with the first Q&A response on the topic.

While it appears to me that FIRST has, in deed, if not in word, reversed the Feb. 16 Q&A response, I can also see how... from another persepective... their answers are logically consistant, even if the inital answer was somewhat ambiguous.

What is doubly unfortunate is that this issue revolves around the witholding limit, which is a great rule, and the increase in the witholding limit to compensate for the many teams that lost time to snow during build season. Making it triply unfortunate, of course, is the timing.

I hope that teams affected by this ruling are able to ship some significant part of their robot, then rebuild a duplicate of the shipped parts so that they can continue to make their robot better while complying with the rules of the game.

Jason