Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[Peyton Yeung]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

You mean like a multi-thousand dollar cRIO previously?
How about the game pieces?
Think about it.

Historically things were often put into the KOP to insure a more even playing field.
There's nothing very fair about the tires not being in there.

If the goal of COTS was to bring the lowest teams up, then AndyMark would have to service the teams with the least ability to make tires first. He has no such control in place now. So he sold out. If I wanted I could have bought all of Andy's tires. Then what? I cornered the market and blocked all the teams that had good reason to buy them. Now I have tires and the shop at FRC11/193 might not need those tires. Effectively blocking all the low resource teams. I wouldn't do that but I could do that and I bet many teams bought more tires than they need so, in a way, they did do that. I could have held that stock past the end of the build season then used it for my stuff for the handicapped or just liquidated it.

Firstly, pneumatic wheels/tank treads are not required for this game. As many teams have demonstrated, standard traction wheels are able to cross the defenses.

Secondly, pneumatic wheels are not impossible to find. Just because it isn't available at the time by our common vendors such as WCP, Vex, or AndyMark doesn't mean it is unobtainable.

If you were to buy all the stock of something from AndyMark that's fine but people will either find a similar product somewhere else or a company will step up to meet demand such as Tank Chain for tread.