Quote:
Originally Posted by BrendanB
I was referencing if there was NO bag and tag system or ship date that Collin mentioned earlier and in several other threads before. What is keeping a team from waiting until good teams compete in week one and the build their robot in the following weeks to do exactly what team X does but better and have it for week 5 all ready to go? It is definitely a very low thing for a team to do, but I am sure that there are teams out there who would do it.
Yes it doesn't happen now because we have ship date and teams can only hold back 40lbs of weight, but I was replying to FIRST moving to a no ship date and every team keeps their robot in between competitions.
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How exactly is it a "very low" thing to do?
FIRST allows you to hold back 65 lbs. If most teams wanted to, they could have rebuilt their robots into a 469/67 type looper. Our frame + drive + electronics is easily over 55 lbs. We'll have had 3.5 weeks between Boilermaker and Championships. Did we do this? Nope. We've been working on making the robot we designed better (improved autonomous, better ball grabber, driver practice). Is it fair that we have a second robot and room to build part of a field while other teams cannot? NO WAY! To me, it's much more fair for teams to just never have to ship their robots. Then, all teams going to Week 5 events would be in the same boat. I would bet that if a team tried to build a "better" 469 in the weeks between Week 1 and their competition, they'd end up with an inferior robot on the field. Very few teams in
FIRST can prototype, design, and fabricate a robot that quickly (then practice, break, fix, and debug that same robot).
In this hypothetical situation, if the team did pull off creating a better version of another robot, I would applaud their efforts and know that they worked their butts off. But don't forget, the good teams that figure out these "dominant" strategies early enough to build a great robot are CONSTANTLY improving their strategies, driving skills, autonomous, and every other aspect of the robot between their competitions, too.
The goal of
FIRST is to Inspire. In my opinion, all three options I laid out can only help grow
FIRST to reach its goal of Inspiring as many kids as possible.