pic: 1675's REAL IRI Upgrade

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I can find you hours upon hours upon hours of traction wheels playing effective defense or offense around mecanum drives. If you're asking me to find a video of a bad frame being smashed to pieces by a traction drive, what does that have to do with anything? The strength of your frame isn't determined by your wheels.

no, i was looking for tractions so powerful they crush stuff. the point is that you are looking for mecanums to be that much better. I will admit that it will not do circles around traction drive. however, it can score more efficiently when scoring involves more than just pushing things.

I'm sure that's why some teams use traction drives, but really? Are you really trying to say that legions of good teams in FRC just make drivetrain decisions because they've never done anything differently? That's pretty awful engineering.

well, why not? if it works, do it. if you look thoguh history of things, breaking from a previous design that was successful has been a flop:

intel i860- was a RISC, not a x86 CISC cpu.
intel itanium- wasn't x86,
atari 5200/atari 7800- the 2600 was good enough, so there wasn't a need to upgrade
wankel engines- radically different than existing piston designs
microsoft bob- people liked the existing windows interface, no upgrade desired


there are more, but if there is no perceived need to change, why do it?

if what you have doesn't work or you are starting new, then that is a different discussion. point is that many top teams have been good for a long time and they never had a big reason to change (from their eyes).



If you gear it high, how are you fundamentally different from a traction drive? High gearing implies traversing long distances. When you're doing that, a traction drive would certainly be able to go slightly diagonally to counteract losing strafing ability.[/quote]