A modest proposal...

[Joe Johnson]

In another message I put forth a theory as to why FIRST has made the ruling about no repair time after a regional.

You should read that message, but it boils down to helping teams limit costs to sponsors (and themselves) by more strictly limiting the build time (more specifically, the re-design and re-build time after a regional).

Now, suppose that this is the reason for the new stricter rules.

I have the following proposal that would allow FIRST to have its cake and for us to eat it too.

FIRST keeps the rules exactly as is: No building parts except during the 6 weeks and at events.

FIRST initiates a petition process that allows teams up to 3 days of "repair time" in make parts for their robots. Petitions are only granted for the following cases:

Part broke at regional that is not manufacturable at a regional AND one of the following conditions are met
1) the break was due to unusual circumstances. Some acceptable examples may include:
. A) a particularly vigorous interaction with another robot
. B) the machine was mistakenly driven into the wall at full speed by our drivers
. C) the part was damaged or lost while trying to fix another problem
. D) we forgot to tighten a bolt down and as a result our gearbox toasted itself.

2) the break is an UNFORSEEN chronicly breaking part that a SIMPLE redesign/re-manufacturing will address, but this re-manufacturing is not makeable at a regional.

An example of a petition that would NOT be approved would be "my robot needs mechanism X so that it can win the Grand Championship." Another petition that should go un-granted would be "my gear ratio is too high and I am popping the breakers and/or losing pushing matches."

I think that this could be a fair compromise that will allow us to fix broken robots without cheating AND it will allow 99% of us to keep our costs down by limiting our ability to do rush re-designs/re-manufacturing/robot improvements.

What do you think?

Joe J.