Limit team $

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Macktack

Having an alliance of GM, NASA and Boeing beat an alliance of student built robots benefits non of the students.

I'm not sure how this came into a thread about money. This belongs in one of the dozens of mentor versus student built threads that have been beat to death over the last several years.

Moving back on topic though, I think even trying to limit team cash is a horrid idea. Do you understand how much it costs for teams from California to attend worlds, when they have to fly their entire group? Or even worse, attendeding from Hawaii? Israel? Australia? England?

Before you suggest that we allow different budgets for different teams, I'll head it off with a quick "No way". This event is about inspiring, not leveling the playing field for all involved.

That all said, our team builds fairly competitive robots and we're no where near a $50,000 budget. In fact, I'd say we're just a tad over 1/2 of that $50,000 number.

I think Ike nailed it. The object here should be to make the competitive costs lower, not tear down the teams that are more fortunate. The District system has done a spectacular job of that.

Switching over to a country wide district system would be much better. Teams who geographically are limited to only 1 event should be able to submit a hardship letter to FIRST and have the points in their first competition count double. This would serve to correct the issue with too many teams in Worlds as well.