Weigh in with or without battery

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally posted by Manoel
The "official battery" idea would also help to check the "is the battery easily removed" item from the inspection, plus, 130 is a nice round number to play with, eh?

It's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the battery compartment on a robot if it's easily removed. However, an "official battery" won't really solve any problems - when you have 4 or more weigh-ins occuring at the same time (some regionals have 2+ scales, the Championship has at least 4 scales), you'd need 4 "official" batteries. And guess what? It would be very likely that there'd be minor variations between the 4.

In that regard, the scales at the Championship seemed to vary by up to 1/2 pound anyway, so there's already a lot of "slop" in the whole weigh-in process. I don't have a problem with people weighing in with the lightest battery they have (as long as it's still a legal battery). There's no rule against it and it only gains them a marginal amount of weight anyway. If there really are teams that would stoop so low as to weigh in with a hollowed out battery, then those teams will find a way to cheat one way or another, making this somewhat of a moot point.