Well since everyone decided it would be best to tell good stories then I will tell everyone a little about our robot and season. I am happy to see the thread turn around to a more gracious place.
We are a smaller team in Louisiana and this is our second year. We went to the Champs last year off a Rookie All Star award. This year we could only afford to go to the Bayou, our local regional, but we did win the regional which was cool. My fellow mentor and I have been doing this 5 years now and this is our first blue banner.
We were a first week regional, and got to be the guinea pig which led to the awesome update 16. Our regional had one of those teams that hadn't passed inspected at all yet and was still being seeded 6th. So many of the robots at the Bayou could hardly score. With that history you can imagine how disappointed we were when we showed up with a looper bot.
So our robot is a looper bot, with the ability to lock to the tower. We have a secondary multipowered kicker and vacuum possessing system. We did have a climb system as well but we lost it prior to the regional due to weight. With that weight off and after moving our battery at the Bayou we are now capable of crossing the bumps. We have an autonomous capable of starting and emptying the balls in any one zone. We can score from middle and front position in automous and were doing so reliably with our alliance partners during elimination matches.
Our biggest disappointment at our Regional was actually having to win the games we played as a scorer bot using our vesatile kicker. We had hoped to be able to setup on the tower and play infinite loop, but there wasn't anyone we were teamed up with that could score reliably enough while defended. (being a first week, none of the students understood defense in qualifiers wasn't the optimum way to play so defense was very hard on all sides the whole regional) We are so looking forward to a much deeper Curie division so that we can see how our looper performs in action.
We did get to use our looper one time during the finals at the Bayou, and that was a good thing because we learned that there is some serious variation in the ball speed coming off the tower. The one time we tried it, the ball we tried to loop was so fast that it bumped off our top bar. We went back and checked tape, and that was of course the fastest ball the entire weekend, being nearly 70% faster than the average. (Murphy's Law is still in effect it seems) It was a good thing to know, since we have a "poptop" we'll be adding for Atlanta so that we catch even the statistical outliers.
I am including two GIF files from our website showing our designed capability, and the link in my signature goes to a page with GIFs of our robot in live action at the Bayou for anyone who wants to see our capabilities. Curie looks like its going to be a fun division and we look forward to playing some good games.
