The Dark Side of the 2013 game

[Hoover]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

We have tipped robots three times this year. At no time did we ever intend to - we simply pushed the robots and they went over. We were never called on it. If you build a tippy robot, the rules do not offer you protection against simple defense. Only clearly intentional tips (e.g. hitting a robot up high outside its bumper zone, driving hard into a partially tipped robot to "finish the job", etc) are called for technical fouls, as they should be.

This is a good clarification. After the driver tipped the robot, when he turned he hit within their frame perimeter. This was due to clumsiness and no way intentional and it wasn't a hard hit. After the event was over I heard one opinion that the latter is what the foul was for. I never addressed a ref on it and I could cleared this whole thing up then and there.

They are 20 points. If the technical foul interfered with a hang, the alliance is given 30 hanging points.

Oh never mind on this as I realize this was total total fouls since that is all that is displayed.

All other things equal, wouldn't wheels farther to the edges of the frame perimeter result in a less tippy robot?

Yes. Now I am thinking this is what made it even more out of context about the hit. It could just be the top heaviness of the robot did all the work. I'd still like to have seen the force that took to do it in a test.

This is an ongoing debate in the FRC world. In the past, intentional fouls have been worth it in niche situations, but in this game a "strategic foul" gets you a potential yellow card, according to the rules and Q&A.

I well know; when we play an alliance that has an offense that is much higher order than us, it is a balancing act on how much defense we can apply. Could it be that FRC wants the winning robots to win on the merits of how good the robots are built and not how much they can be denied performance? I think that is an obvious yes.