The cheesecake runaway

[Kevin Sevcik]

Count me with Dr. Joe as being opposed to this level of cheesecaking. It's troubling to me that this sort of thing could encourage teams to build and/or strip down robots specifically to act as platforms for another team's mechanism. Somehow I don't think "Design and build for 6 weeks, then scrap it all to spend 24 hours integrating someone else's design" is quite what's intended for this program.

As has been pointed out here already, what outside of practicality is preventing a team from bagging an entire robot and then cheesecaking it onto another team's RoboRIO during Division elims? I don't think you can game design around that level of cheesecake. Yes, the receiving team's drivers wouldn't be as experienced, but you could mitigate that by picking the quickest learners and giving them practice time on your official bot before the alliance pairings. If Team [Famous Number] was bruiting about they had a practice robot to cheesecake onto a 2nd/3rd pick, I'm pretty sure after this season you'd have at least a handful of teams interested in the offer. Now that we know stripping down to a ultralight kitbot drivetrain is acceptable cheesecaking, I'm not sure what's preventing this last step.