Rubbin' is Racin'

[tcjinaz]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I think your sentiment has merit, but that proposed rule amounts to a suicide pact, if by "severely and equally" you mean cards.

Now all I have to do is convince an alliance partner that they should go and interact as vigourously as possible with an opponent. Offer them candy, or money, or safety tokens (and don't tell the referees about the bribe). Anything of value to offset the card they're about to earn. For the rest of the qualifying round, that opponent will have to think twice about coming near any other robots, for fear of getting carded again (and dropping in the standings).

Even discounting subterfuge, this rule would probably offend our collective sense of justice. "You're punishing me for what they did to our robot?"

I was not proposing disallowance of any contact. That is the extreme of the North American Yacht Racing Union, the first group's competition rules I was blessed to deal with (and lost a junior world championship by touching a non-competitor).

The subject line is a NASCAR reference, and a reality. 40+ NASCAR Sprint Cup cars on a half mile track do not fit. Six FRC robots on a basketball court just barely fit. Thus, the proposition that bumper to bumper contact is expected. One practice day of intolerance of other forms of contact should rearrange the mindsets of most teams.

To an earlier poster, you have not watched enough YouTube. [G27] could easily have been numbered [G<team number>]. Every year, every team has students show up looking for "Robot Wars"; sometimes they make it onto the drive team.

There has been a silly amount of lawyering about contact for a set of rules released three weeks ago. Let's learn from the experience of others (NAYRU, SCCA, many more). The point of the exercise is to Cooperatively do good, not destroy the opposition so We can go to St Louis.