the spirit of the rule...
What FIRST wanted with the rule is to make sure teams needing new parts after an intense regional get to make new parts afterward.
And the spirit of the rule is to make sure teams use whatever they make within the legal building time.
At the beginning, I thought FIRST was enforcing the rule by telling teams they HAVE to ship everything with the robot so everything is made within 6 weeks. Turns out the question asking about this rule was about "may we ship tools after the shipping date?", and FIRST said that they won't know if it's really tools in the later crate or not, so they won't allow it. This seems to imply teams HAVE to ship everything with the robot...
HOWEVER, at a later question, FIRST said that teams can keep a spare robot to practice, and that "gracious professionalism" is key. So really, FIRST is trusting teams to follow rules.
So, with that, I am sure FIRST AREN'T enforcing teams to ship EVERYTHING with the crate to a second event or a third one, according to the ruling of allowing teams to keep a practice robot and still use it.
Now, about shipping the whole robot and taking parts home after a regional... How can FIRST decide whether a team is taking home a part, or almost the whole robot? If you are just taking home the drive train, and put the rest into the crate, is that really the whole robot? Where do we draw the line between parts and a full robot?
Besides, FIRST will never really check if you brought a part to a regional or not, nor could they verify if a part is made within the legal building time or not. We can find all the loop holes we want, but the bottom line is, do we feel we are following the rule or not. There is a fine line between following rules and breaking the rules.
As long as you are truly using parts made during legal building time, then you don't have to worry about it.
If you are keeping the spare robot after the regional and completely rework it all week long and got a champion robot out of that, then it's probably not ok. If you are shipping a full robot, but you got so much spare parts that you can put together another robot, and you go home and improve it during the 3~4 days, and it become a champion robot, then that's just the same as taking the robot home with you…
Bottom line is, FIRST wouldn't have ways to know if you stop Wednesday night or not anyway.
So, I don't think teams really need to stress themselves about having to ship parts away after a regional. Take your time after the regional to finish the gearbox or whatever parts it is, and take it to Florida with you. You could always make half the component after the first regional, and the rest after the second regional, and bring both to Florida.
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