Mythical Six Week Build Season

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

The issue is we need to build a 2nd robot, and sometimes per team (we have 2) to be competitive and have time to train the drivers on that year's robot even with 20 years of experience in how to build FRC robots. That's at least 2-4 control systems cost and the load of both this work on the mentors and the contributions on the local community. To some level that scales with the number of participants and to some level it does not.

This right here is your biggest assumption - that you need to build two robots to be competitive. As I said, my team never has, and except for two years hasn't even designed improvements after stop build, yet we've been to elims a bunch, finalists a bunch, and winners twice. Yeah, we weren't close to Einstein, but you don't have to be up that high to be competitive or successful with your team.

You are choosing to put that added work on yourselves because you feel the benefit outweighs the cost - but it's not something that is required to be competitive.