paper: Stop the Stop Build

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by kaliken

So I am curious. If you had no bag and tag would you still build a practice bot?

Yes. For the following reasons:

1. The practice robot usually often serves as a "beta edition" of the competition robot. Developing one helps you catch issues that can be entirely circumvented in a clean manner on the competition robot.
2. There's only room for so many hands on a robot at one time. Having a practice robot allows for software and mechanical development to happen in parallel. Even with a true 16 week build season, there would still be time crunches where having to development platforms would be an asset.
3. Wear and tear. Our competition robot is usually at the end of its life span by the end of Championship. Our practice robot always in much worse shape than the competition robot. I can't imagine putting that many hours of drive time into one robot.

This probably doesn't apply for most teams. But for a team who has the resources to comfortably complete two robots, it's easy for me to see why they would continue to do so, even with the potential abandonment of the bag.