paper: The Penalties will continue until Morale Improves

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by fb39ca4

I have no experience with pneumatics, but why do you say bumper rules are subpar?

Don't get me wrong: the bumper rules have improved markedly each of the last couple years. 5 years ago they were basically a travesty. (Here are some of my suggestions from that era; I would still stand by most of that. I grant that there has been a lot more robot violence this year, which increases the utility of a bumper.)

Despite the improvements, there are still too many vague bumper rules. Bumpers are fundamentally overspecified for the limited purpose they serve, and yet those specifications are often underdefined or (more so historically) contradictory. This is hard to understand and hard to enforce fairly and with a straight face¹ and leads to a lot of effort (on the part of teams and officials), for very little benefit.

It has long been my experience that bumpers and pneumatics take up a disproportionate amount of a lead inspector's time, because those rule sets are the ones most likely to require complex interpretations that turn on very fine details. They are consequently the most controversial, and therefore induce the most argumentation and the most animosity.

¹ As an inspector, I've been criticized, understandably, for rigourously enforcing useless bumper requirements like frame perimeter support. Some inspectors didn't enforce that rule—again understandably, because it was stupid—but this led to inconsistency between events.