Fueling Scoring Challenge

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

Potential issue with this is that you're hogging the entire boiler if you're sitting right in front of it like this, but that might be OK if you're the ball specialist and you're teamed up with two gear specialists looking to get that RP. Or if other high-goal shooters are able to aim at the boiler from a distance so you're not in each other's way.

If you can actually score at 10-15 bps, you're the only ball scorer your team needs, literally, since you're outrunning the high boiler scoring mechanism. Your partners should be gearing and maybe dumping haphazardly collect balls at your feet.

GeeTwo's math makes sense. 15 balls x 6" center-to-center = 90"/s = 7.5 ft/s. And that's horizontal movement at the top of the arc. Let's try some back of the envelope experimenting with logic and a trajectory calculator:

• Assume you need to get the center of the ball 2.1m up from the last point your shooter accelerates it.
• You'd need 21 ft/s vertical velocity, and it'd take you 0.65s to hit the apex.
• If you have the previously calculated lateral velocity of 7.5 ft/s you've travelled 59" laterally when you hit the apex.
• Front edge of the goal is 6" back from the wall. So your release point needs to be 53" back from the wall. So your robot's not touching the wall.
• 10 balls per sec = 5 ft/s = 33" set back. Which may be doable, since you don't HAVE to aim at the front-center edge.

This is all roughly speaking, of course. Drag is going to slow the balls down and complicate things, which will probably require higher separation and more lateral speed. Reasoning about it, here's ways to improve your max rate of fire:

• This is a limit for one stream of balls. Multiple streams will reduce the balls/sec in the stream but maintain the total bps.
• Shoot from the side instead of dead center to increase your distance to the edge of the goal.

A higher release point isn't as helpful as I would think. A 30" release point shaves 0.05s off flight time to apex, for a miserable 3" savings in lateral distance.

I think good high rate of fire teams will have a 2-3 wide shooter at the back of the robot, optimized for shooting diagonally into the goal.

EDIT: Also thinking about a single stream shooter, this means you're shoving balls through your feed system at 6.25 ft/s to acheive 15 balls/s. Which sounds pretty insane, honestly. 10 balls/sec with 3 streams makes for 1.4 ft/s, which seems somewhat more reasonable.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

If you can actually score at 10-15 bps, you're the only ball scorer your team needs, literally, since you're outrunning the high boiler scoring mechanism. Your partners should be gearing and maybe dumping haphazardly collect balls at your feet.

Competition is going to be so much fun to watch, with robots machine-gunning balls at the goals.

But regardless of how effective your shooter is, the problem remains that if you sit at the base of the boiler you're occupying that space. One of the (many) reasons our team decided to specialize in gears is the realization that a low-goal dumper or a basic high-goal shooter is likely going to want to sit right next to the boiler, which means there will be congestion and/or a line-up to get in there.