FRC T-bone-ing and Hexagonal drive

[Ty Tremblay]

Originally Posted by EricH

Ty, would you consider PVC, speed drive, or filecards to be more important for the Beatty BEAST of '02? And I'm sure Element '06 and Element '07 would disagree--winning a regional from the last pick with nothing but a drivetrain (and good partners/defense ability) kind of puts a hole there...


That being said, a drivetrain by itself won't win an event, but a bad drivetrain will lose you that event. The three most important elements of a robot are drivetrain, drivetrain, and drivetrain (Mr. Bill Beatty, in paraphrase). However, I would consider rapid acquisition of game objects to be a close fourth--and if you can acquire them, you can presumably remove them from your robot.

tl;dr: A good robot--which is a combination of a good drivetrain, a good manipulator system ("on top of" the drivetrain), a good drive team, and a good strategy--is essential to winning an event, but different teams' mixtures of those four elements can all win.

Game breaking strategies like 2002 are not an accurate example in this era of FRC. 3rd robots aren't going to get picked for their hexagonal drivetrains. They're going to get picked for having solid, well driven drivetrains. If a team has to sacrifice either of those two in the least then they are not a team that should build a hexagonal drivetrain. My team, 319, is one of those teams.