Announcing the 2013 December Design Competition

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by MichaelBick

I don't find this competition to be all about developing strategy. I think it will also help our CAD team work better together and faster.

All design in FRC is (should be) strategy driven. If you're not thinking about strategy when designing something for this competition, you're not really practicing the essential skills you'll need to have finely polished in 30 days.

This game is challenging, the manual is hard to understand, and a lot of the challenges have some annoying constraints / features that make them quite hard to achieve. But something will probably work. Now is a good time to practice the use of center of mass analysis, material properties, etc. in order to design a robot that is able to complete the game task with any semblance of stability.

In short, sure you could just say "this is a design challenge" and skip finding an optimal strategy, but why miss out on all aspects of the experience?

I would say the asymmetric field is a big problem of the game design, particularly the location of the limbo bar (I think just removing this would fix a lot of the game). However, it's not like FRC games don't have big flaws to design around as well.