[EricH]

Originally Posted by Jazonk

2. The 1/4 - 1in platform under the bump. I distinctly remember this was not in the game animation, so no one was aware that we needed to design for it. It caused carrying penalties galore, gave us serious problems traversing the bump, and made us have to re-tune our hanger after we were unable to click on the first time. Why couldn't they have extended the wood all the way to the walls, to make an even playing field? Or have told us about it earlier?

I have a negative. It directly follows from the above post. While this is specifically directed at the above poster, I'm more annoyed about the general stuff (below the direct response) than missing something that was partially buried in a paragraph in an area that teams don't generally like to read unless they're building their field. This is not intended to be a specific attack on anyone, but a general "Wake UP!" call for next year.

Once again, there are a number of teams that did not read the full Manual and thereby missed out on some critical rules and dimensions.

The fact that there was a 1/2" bump was called out in both Section 6.2.3, sentences 5-7, and Field Drawings GE-10002 and GE-10003 (bump and tower plates, respectively). It was there on Day 1, it was there the last day of Championship, it was never changed. They did tell you.

There are teams that didn't have their relief valves on the compressor (not the storage tank, a hard pipe to the compressor, etc.) as required by the rules when they showed up for inspection. There was a team (admittedly, a rookie team) that showed up with what would have been an active mechanism above the bumper zone, before being reminded by a veteran team that that was not legal. Another team had neither relief valve nor vent valve prior to inspection. The list goes on, and I'm sure that other inspectors could tell you more horror stories about illegal teams from this year. Let alone last year and the year before...

While those teams do eventually fix their robots to be in compliance, it takes a lot of time that neither the teams nor the inspectors necessarily have.