An ethical question

[_GP_]

I'm glad to see that everyone seems to have ound it within them to forgive our team for our transgressions... I must really take the blame myself, I was the most involved in the rules and knowing them...

Originally Posted by Raul

The fact that we all agree to ignore that the official rule was broken just supports the argument that this rule should be modified somehow.

I think that the rule should not be modified, it makes sense. I mean If our team had been at any other regional we would have been stuck. A major goal of FIRST is to maintain an even playing field among all teams, and this rule is a part of that.

What I do think should change is the shop. Hardened Steel, while not very common on robots, isn't that uncommon. It doesnt take that many resources by FIRST to add a few drill bits to their shop. No team should need to go off site to fix a part.

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

The Nu-trons, a 7th year veteran team finished 49th out of 51 with at least 75% of rookies doing better than us. We had no downtime, every single minute the robot was in the pits we were repairing design problems. To illustrate how bad it was: I'm one of the programmers, I had to implement new feature in the software. I had less than 10 minutes to do this between matches.

On Thursday we only got 1 practice round because we were working, we spent ever second in between our rounds on Friday working, and that didnt help... we were immobile for two matches. We used our time after our Friday matches to fix the transmissions... (unknowningly against the rules). Don't think that since we broke a rule, that we had it any easier than you. This was only one fix to one problem we had with our robot.

Alot of teams seemed to struggle this year. Our mentor team 140 came in 43/51 after they had last minute design problems and had to revert to another arm the last week of the build season...

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

I am thinking...How lucky you are to have access to DEKA! (Can I be envious and still be gracious?) One of the major points of this competition is for students to be exposed to engineering and engineers by working with them. I, for one, know in my heart that Dean would go out of his way to make sure that any DEKA employees would not have an unfair advantage over other teams. He would personally make sure that the rules would be strictly followed.

That was the reason I started this thread, because after seeing the amazing resource that our mentor had, but felt he could not let us use, I felt that I had to try to convince him that they should sponsor us. even if our team could spend one night a week in their workshop it would be an amazing resource and experience for the students...