Visualizing the 54in cylinder

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Ken Streeter

If an attempt is made by inspectors and referees to require the rule to be satisfied, they will be the "bad guys" for many teams that didn't fully understand the limitation and come to tournaments with robots that are illegal in some circumstances. Referees will have to make judgment calls that will be hard to substantiate either way. Many teams will have invested countless hours building robots that are regularly illegal.

...

From my perspective, the 54" cylinder rule is a practically unenforceable rule that is big lose-lose scenario. Why the GDC would not learn from past mistakes and continue to make such unenforceable rules is a mystery to me. I've even mentioned rules such as this on previous end-of-season surveys...

In past years where we had maximum expansion rules (such as intakes last year) inspectors were asked to check if the robots could expand beyond that. If they COULD they would be noted and be watched closer. This isn't optimal but it's the best we mere mortals can do I guess (I hate volume limitations like this).