The Sky is not Falling, but FIRST is Making a BIG Mistake ...
A big mistake if they do not change the rule.
First I have to say that in my opinion, this rule is very cruel. It will make a lot of people angry at each other. One might graciously accept or at least swallow having their robot damaged by another based on a strategy to "incapacitate". But definite not if they know they will no longer be able to compete because it cannot be repaired.
I am just wondering how Bill Beatty feels about this rule. I know Bill has strong feelings about teams being allowed to do anyhting to improve their robot after the 1st 6 week period. But I wonder how he feels about not being able to do repairs off-line. Hey Bill, I want to hear Carnack wisdom.
Last, I want to say that there is a way around most of this without cheating:
All you have to do is consider your damages and use the time between competitions to plan your actions precisely when yo get to there to do the repairs or improvements. We did this in 2000 when the rules also required shipping your robot from event to event and improvements only on site. We conceived a design which could easily be built on site with simple raw parts and were able to practice building it before we got there. That way we knew ahead of time exacly what to do on practice day to fix our design. It worked well enough to allow us to be #1 seed and win the Midwest reional.
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Warning: this reply is just an approximation of what I meant to convey - engineers cannot possibly use just written words to express what they are thinking.
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