Value of a Gear Ground Pickup

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

It has nothing to do with autonomous mode - scoring multiple gears in auton is foolish. Scoring more than 10 balls is both much easier (in that you can repeatably do it without any assistance) and much more rewarding.

I'm going to stop being coy like I was in the autonomous thread, and lay out exactly why I think you're wrong here. At the highest levels of play, we will see 2-gear autonomous modes. Stop thinking about it in terms of how many points an individual robot can score in autonomous, and start thinking about how you can maximize your alliances' autonomous score.

Let's start with the following assumptions:
*The alliance is composed is two "high functionality" autonomous teams (scoring hopper fuel, scoring multiple gears, or scoring both pre-loaded fuel and pre-loaded gear) and one "average functionality" autonomous team (scoring pre-loaded fuel or scoring single gear).
*Time and travel restrictions will it impossible for multiple robots on the same alliance to complete a hopper scoring autonomous with sufficient time to process scored fuel
*Time and travel restrictions will make it impossible for the same team to score BOTH it's pre-loaded gear AND the hopper fuel
*It's not possible for the same robot to place 3 gears on a lift with sufficient time to start 2 rotors before the end of autonomous

Based on those four assumptions, the highest scoring combination of three routines would be as follows:
Robot A - Drops pre-loaded gear, loads from hopper, scores in high efficiency goal
Robot B - Places pre-loaded gear on lift, picks up Robot A's gear, places Robot A's gear on lift
Robot C- Places pre-loaded gear on lift

The 20 bonus points from starting an additional rotor in autonomous is worth twice as many points as either Robot B or Robot C scoring their pre-loaded fuel in the high efficiency boiler with 100% accuracy. This is precisely why I think we're going to see a handful of alliances at the DCMP/CMP level employ 2-gear autonomous routines.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

If you are the kind of team who constantly drops gears... well... your ground pickup won't likely be good anyway.

I also don't think I agree with this.