Taking the Bag out of Bag Day

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Originally Posted by hawktomatoes

The only problem I see with this is that there is a 6 week build season for a reason and extending it gives some teams more of an advantage for driver practice and ability to alter their robot. You'd be seeing more 5-7 competition week robots at champs most likely. I can also see regionals being moved out farther in competition season so they have more time to change things and perfect their robot. If they could figure out a way to make this fair, I think that it would be a great idea. FIRST is changing a lot currently, maybe the bag day rule will sometime be changed. I just hope it's for the better.

I don't follow your logic at all.

Originally Posted by hawktomatoes

The only problem I see with this is that there is a 6 week build season for a reason and extending it gives some teams more of an advantage for driver practice and ability to alter their robot."

It gives ALL teams the advantage of more driver practice, vs now where some have it and others don't. I don't see any problems.

Why would regional/district events change their dates? It has nothing to do with robots bagged/unbagged and everything to do with location availability. Assuming events don't change, all week 5-7 teams will be better than they currently are now, and all week 1-2 teams could build/practice on their comp. bot straight through to their competition, making them better too. Everyone wins, and the field is more fair than it currently is now, where well-to-do teams have the sizable advantage. Teams that do week 1 events are still going to do them for the same reason they do them now; they are more ready than everyone else.

[MrForbes]

I don't know what we'd do, but maybe we'll find out this coming week. We finally built a practice robot. We spent hardly anything on it, maybe $100? a few extra (kit) drive belts, and a couple extra hubs to put rollers on shafts. We used last year's chassis, with this year's modifications. We only have one electronics assembly, so it's part of our withholding.

I think the plan right now is for driver practice and autonomous testing. After our first regional, we'll probably use it do develop the new mechanisms we discover we need, and fix the design problems we find.

But I don't really like "fuzzy" rules like this proposal. Putting the whole thing in a box and getting rid of it was pretty nice, it was out of sight and out of mind until the competitions.

[hawktomatoes]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

It gives ALL teams the advantage of more driver practice, vs now where some have it and others don't. I don't see any problems.
Why would regional/district events change their dates? It has nothing to do with robots bagged/unbagged and everything to do with location availability. Assuming events don't change, all week 5-7 teams will be better than they currently are now, and all week 1-2 teams could build/practice on their comp. bot straight through to their competition, making them better too. Everyone wins, and the field is more fair than it currently is now, where well-to-do teams have the sizable advantage. Teams that do week 1 events are still going to do them for the same reason they do them now; they are more ready than everyone else.

I'm understanding a little more of what you're trying to say and why this would be a good system. Thanks for the clarification Something else to consider is how fair the regional is going to be at a 5th week regional when there is a robot who is playing on an actual field for the first time going against a robot that has been to 1 or 2 other regionals that year. Is there any way to get around that issue?

[Breadbocks]

My understanding of why we have bag day is to make it even for the teams that have to ship their robots halfway around the world to compete. Those teams don't have to worry about getting a practice bot from their local facilities to competition, but they do have to get their competition bot there. So to make it fair, FIRST says everybody has to stop working on what they're bringing to competition and the international teams aren't screwed because they don't live in 'murica or one of the few other countries with regionals.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Breadbocks

My understanding of why we have bag day is to make it even for the teams that have to ship their robots halfway around the world to compete. Those teams don't have to worry about getting a practice bot from their local facilities to competition, but they do have to get their competition bot there. So to make it fair, FIRST says everybody has to stop working on what they're bringing to competition and the international teams aren't screwed because they don't live in 'murica or one of the few other countries with regionals.

I'm not sure who told you that. There are some other assumptions made such as practice bot that not all teams have, including ours. We never had one.
As a much younger mentor back in the day when we first got started in 1999, I was told about the FIRST challenge of building a robot in 6 weeks (plus 3 days actually) and it being the hardest fun we ever will experience.
It all changed when withholding allowances were allowed for whatever reasons over the years.
Our program, efforts and setup was created and built over the years based on that premise. We also cant change much because the robot spends all of its time away from home vs the time it was here to create it until mid-May.
Bag/tag made it an extra burden on our program because FIRST provides way less support than they used to because most teams simply drive it to an event.

I understand that many robots and teams get better because they have more time to iterate, especially after a previous event. Quite frankly, I dont know how teams can do it after all the sacrificial time and effort is spent during the official build season. I like Jim's reasoning of the Out of Sight/Out of Mind deal where your mind and body can take a break.

Any changes to Bag/Tag will fundamentally add to the changes of how we view the official Build Season. It'll be interesting to watch it all unfold in the years to come on how they deal with this, if any.
This would further our disadvantages being from Hawaii. But like most teams, we try our best to adjust to whatever changes are made, and hope to still be competitive. Interesting thread though..