Philosophies on design reuse

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by wilhitern1

If I remember the rules correctly... (probably not)... If you fully publish everything about how to build your design. You can then use 100% of it year over year...

Neal

I'll have to go back and check the manual on that.

I believe Adam is talking about the idea of reusing a certain amount of physical parts from a previous year. It's an interesting idea since at first glance it seems to go against the nature of the competition as it currently exists. I think I like the idea since it would help the finance situation for some teams. I don't really see a world class team creating, for example, a set of awesomely light / compact / machining intensive swerve modules and reusing them every year. Instead they'd probably choose to make subtle improvements and fabricate the new version each season. But I could see a team benefiting from the ability to reuse a C-Channel with a couple of holes drilled in it.

The idea of publishing your design to legally use it in competition only appears in the manual regarding software (2009-2012 rules). The manual doesn't really provide an answer as to whether publishing CAD drawings makes it legal to reuse a design. But as others have said, it's basically a moot point since you can make a trivial modification and then be technically legal.

It should simply be legal to design stuff before the build season.