Limiting Drivetrain Motors

[JamesCH95]

Lil'Lavery brings up a good point - it is inspirational to 'do more with less' and a lot of anti-power-limiting sentiment is based on flawed logic. However, I think that the 'enough rope to hang yourself with' philosophy is a better approximation of real-life engineering than 'try to do more with less.' I think that it's far easier to terminally screw up a project by getting too ambitious and overspending/over-promising than it is to exceed expectations.

ChrisIsMe and Andrew Schriber both hit the nail on the head - poor game design and (related) overworked refs lead to the serious amount of high-speed ramming we saw this year. Heck, our 4-cim robot managed to shear its deck during a bumper-to-bumper high-speed hit. Dropping the motor count down to 4 cims again wouldn't have prevented this from occurring.

I'll draw a parallel: F1 racing. Every few years the allowed engine displacement is reduced, or the amount of time an engine must be in service is increased. These rules are designed to limit the power available to F1 teams, but guess what? Lap times generally just keep dropping, and dropping.... So I don't think that dialing back on available motors will really solve the problem of 'robots that are too fast' unless our motor selection is reduced to the days of yore when 3/8 drill motors ruled the land. In 2013 no one complained about having too many motors, nor was there carnage on the field from high-speed hits despite having essentially the same motor selection available. The differences? Protected scoring and loading positions, non-open fields, and a scoring system that didn't rely on multiple refs poking through multiple menus to enter in scoring actions on their input consoles (taking time away from actually reffing the match).

Reducing motor count, barring severe restrictions, won't reduce high-speed impact damage. 4-cim robots are more than capable of causing severe damage with open-field bumper-to-bumper hits. Good game design will reduce high speed impact damage. See 2013, where defense was more cat-and-mouse than WWF smackdown, despite having essentially the same available motors.

Originally Posted by colin340

Fair point, but this year we got called for hitting the defense bots back too hard. Teams that are blockading / pinning a partner should design for 13 fps hits or get out the way.

i'm sick of playing tea party games / soccer.

Clearly you've never played soccer at a serious competitive level.

Originally Posted by Richard Wallace

I like motors.

If it ever becomes necessary to limit robot mobility, FIRST should prohibit wheels that contact the playing field surface.

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Oh, and @the earlier comment comparing limited mobility games to tea parties / soccer: there's a guy named Dempsey who probably would not agree that soccer is anything like a tea party.

None of these guys would agree either.

/threadjack