Catapult vs Wheeled Shooter

[M217]

Catapults had one big advantage this year that my team discussed in the early build season: typically, the vast majority of a catapult's variance is up-down (largely because of small inaccuracies in distance reading) while they are incredibly consistent left-right. The shape of this years goal allows for a little up-down inconsistency, since that's the longer dimension. I remember a lot of the catapult's I've seen hit a little lower than dead center from the outerworks (for example, 359's balls in tech valley seemed to touch the lower lip of the goal fairly often) but they still went in fine. For this reason, I think catapults were a lot more viable this year than they have been in previous years, and I would applaud any team that built one for making a sound strategic choice.

That being said, the packaging of a wheeled shooter and the flat linear trajectory (at least when you shoot as hard as we do) seemed to offer enough advantages that we decided to go with that. We didn't think defense would be too much of an issue because we planned for a fast release, and we'd already began work on a swerve drive that would make us much harder to pin and block.

The catapult is definitely a good choice this year, more so than I think it was in rebound rumble, but I think there are still advantages to having a wheeled shooter that make the decision nontrivial.