Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

What are people afraid of here, really? That we have teams buying their way to a competitive robot? Really? This is the problem with FIRST that keeps you up at night?

Not really. The problem is that when your competitors can get a robot that was designed over years with no respect for the build times with much less investment of their time. You no longer can compete if you fabricate yourself unless you literally also design what you are making over years. Basically you are foolishly following a 'rule' to the letter when your competitors are not really doing so.

So yes this allows other teams to be competitive. In fact it allows them to be more than competitive. It allows them to raise the bar so high that a six week build season is not even relevant any more. That same six week build season we keep telling people is the holy grail of keeping things even.

If this was not actually an issue I bet FIRST would not even exist. It came up often in the early days. Eventually the next goal will not just be to make it COTS. It will be to drive down the cost by any means because that's the only barrier. Then, as you see today already, you'll make the parts anywhere you can get cheap labor and shipping which is making this stuff anywhere but in your neck of the woods for a lot of people in FIRST.

So yes it drives the competition but it erodes a fundamental. Maybe we just don't care about that any more. Maybe some of us are just relics of an old sales pitch. If so that's fine.

The fact that we want to pretend that the only way to address this is to block COTS is as much the issue.
We can also go positive and just reward when the FIRST teams use less COTS as a special case and separate award - and let the competition field decide if the resulting robot is competitive against COTS.
Maybe some years it will be, maybe not, at least as long as the game each year remains secret it will block perfect matches from multi-year COTS builds.
Oh wait the market has recently floated letting the supply side know the game early - how early? Like a year or so ahead?
Surely the suppliers wouldn't build perfect COTS parts for 1 year once they know the game early.
I mean it's not like a very particular drive train element (ahem treads) would just appear at the start of a game that fits it perfectly!
No that would never happen.

Sooner or later this is going to be exactly like FTC before it. Does that actually surprise anyone really considering where FTC fits between FLL and FRC? The only difference will be a larger field and bigger robots.