[moderated] 469 Entanglement / Bad Refereeing on Galileo

[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by Stu Bloom

And by the way, Ken W, I thought I was starting to like you, but ...
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... I guarantee you I can build something stronger and put an impact point on my machine, find your weak spot and take you out on the field...
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... was that a threat? That is a lot different than what I saw in any matches in Atlanta. If you think "that's what FIRST is coming to" then why don't you try it. I would be interested to see if a ref would call that one ... I know I would.

not a threat, an attempt to illustrate that the rules in the official manual use what we call 'weasle words' in engineering - when the person writing a spec does not know eactly what to say, so they put in something vague - like 'your robot must be robust'

whatever you build, to your definition of 'robust', I can build something stronger or faster.. that will disable your bot on the field - and the ref is left standing there with nothing to base his call on.

ok, how many PSI or joules/sec impact must we design a bot to for it to be considered 'robust'?

so far no-one has been able to come back and site any examles of a team being disqualified for damaging or tipping another teams robot - but lots of teams got damaged and tipped this year - so why do we have the rule?

for many years FIRST has prided itself on our teams good sportsmanship, and somewhat looked down its collective nose at professional sports - but every year things get more and more agressive and it appears to have reached the point where anything-goes is the only rule in the elimination rounds and the finals

as I aluded to - I have seen things at events this year that would not be allowed in football, soccer, baseball, basketball or even in a HOCKEY game - this is what Im talking about when asking if this is what FIRST has come to?

is this what we want? its like FIRST's dirty little secret - in all the promotional videos you dont see bots being smashed into flying pieces, or bots being rammed and knocked flying on their sides, but its happening in the games, and apparently teams are not even being called for it

so far one ref has pointed out one team getting called for entanglement this year

Im not picking on any one ref or any one event, Im asking - is this where FIRST really wants to go? is this what WE want FIRST to turn into

I vote no. I think the rules should be spelled out more clearly - its would not be hard to make a first draft of what the rules should have spelled out this year, based on the number of occurances of teams being 'taken out' of matches by their opponents at events all around the country.