Past Year's Fields - Team Versions

[itsjustjon]

In the past three years, I've noticed that FIRST releases game elements for teams to use for wooden designs in varying detail/adherence to the real field's facets. For example, 2016's wooden designs included every defense, but 2017's only had the feeder stations and a very un-Boiler-esque boiler.

Were there any games, say, pre-2014 where the wooden version varied greatly from what the real field actually contained?

[Whippet]

The 2013 pyramid was rather dangerously unstable and many teams ended up using a lot of ratchet straps to hold it together. In addition, The 2012 bridge had very different balancing properties from the competition version.

[Koko Ed]

Many teams work out of classrooms and have no place to set up a full field and have to make do with minimized field elements due to space constraints.

[Foster]

Our team built "Rack" from Rack and Roll, it was a thing of beauty. Shout out to Ernie Schwenk who built the game elements my first years.

Field elements for FRC was one of the things that impressed me, could the elements team build the field faster than the robot team? In the early days of counting pennies, it hurt to visit Home Depot to drop $500 on wood to build something that had a 8 week life.

I loved the DTEngineering post (summary) "It took two of us about five hours in a well-equipped wood shop to slice up all the parts, and a couple hours for teams of students to assemble them." I follow Jason, and read that to mean "it's material for a small house, and even with Tab A into Slot B it was still a two day adventure".

[Conor Ryan]

They have been, and will continue to be, short of the real thing. The '04 Tetra debacle was a weird one. Rack and Roll really did challenge teams to engineer a better solution, and the pyramid was the worst in recent memory.

If you have time, resources and somebody who can get creative with the actual field drawings, I would encourage them to have full creative power to engineer something different. The practice field usually starts as the team drawings and goes through a few iterations before it makes its way to the field truck, but I have never seen drawings of those.

[ATannahill]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

They have been, and will continue to be, short of the real thing. The '04 Tetra debacle was a weird one. Rack and Roll really did challenge teams to engineer a better solution, and the pyramid was the worst in recent memory.

If you have time, resources and somebody who can get creative with the actual field drawings, I would encourage them to have full creative power to engineer something different. The practice field usually starts as the team drawings and goes through a few iterations before it makes its way to the field truck, but I have never seen drawings of those.

Tetras were in '05.

The pyramid was especially horrible since the corners were not representative of the actual field. Teams that were only planning to hang off the bottom rung could go with a simple horizontal bar, but teams that wanted more than that were hard pressed to practice.