[artdutra04]

To everyone who would miss the "finality" of the ship date... wouldn't the arrival of the Regional yield the same finality" to robot build time? It's a different finality, but still a finality.

Unlike some previous posters, I completely disagree that this would lead to a greater gulf between "have" and "have not" teams, but rather believe the opposite would occur. The "have" teams already have full practice fields, practice robots, and a dynamic partnership between their mentors, students, teachers, and sponsors. No matter how long the build season is, they will still crank out amazing robots.

But for the middle of the road teams, just another week could make the difference between a robot that barely works to one which works quite well, and with a bit of driver experience. For these teams, time is their most limiting resource. Give these teams more time, and they have more man-hours of robot design, fabrication, and testing time.

But there comes a point where increasing the number of man-hours leads to decreasing return-on-investment. A gut intuition guess would be that many of the powerhouse teams are nearing this peak, and that an extra week might only help them improve their robot efficiency in its operation by maybe 10%. On the other hand, a middle of the road or rookie team with much less resources and man-hours spent on their robot might see a 50% boost in performance from the same additional week of the build season.

Since such an eliminate-ship-date-rule would not in anyway set a glass ceiling limiting how high the "have" teams can reach, while still providing an immeasurable benefit to the middle of the road and rookie teams, as well as drastically increase the competitiveness and excitement of competitions (much to the delight of the audience), this is something I whole-heartedly support.