"Spare Parts" Rules Are Broken

[Gary Dillard]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Its unfair because in engineering you always have to make tradeoffs

if your bot needs work then you cant pratice

if you decide to start making changes to your bot that will keep it from running on thursday then your team will get no practice

if you shipped a bot that still needed work then your team will get no practice

allow a team to build a second bot, and continue to work on it after the ship date, and bring it to the regional on the bus, and use it on the field to get practice

while the other teams have to decide which is more important, modifying the bot or meeting the practice schedule

Its clearly an unfair advantage to more heavily financed and supported teams - I know FIRST is unfair on some levels, but we dont have to make it worse by letting well funded teams do whatever they please, taking every possible advantage over the little guy.

That's all really nice Ken, but it has nothing to do with the rules - you can't make up your own just because you don't like it.

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

why would you think you can bring something else to drive around on the playfield? can we drive our bus on the field? why not? its not in the rules either?

I would guess that your bus would damage the field, and as such the ref's wouldn't allow it on the field.

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

besides, FIRST has a very clear definition of what you teams 'robot' is and what its not - your practice bot is NOT your teams robot

You did actually make one valid point in that post that caused me to look and answer my own question - from section 7.1 in the rules "The purpose of the Practice Rounds is to allow each Team a chance to run its Robot on the Playing Field prior to the start of the competition matches." That's the answer - I would agree that there is a clear definition on what your robot is, and the practice round is for that robot. Therefore, the rules state you must drive your competition robot "THE robot" in the practice rounds.