Cost Determination, Section 5.3.4.4

[KenWittlief]

If my sponsor buys unobtanium in bulk lots of ten tons for $1 million and that's the ONLY way you can get it, then my using 2 pounds of it for just $100 is patently unfair. The rules are, in fact, occasionally about fairness rather than encouraging the use of every exotic material and technique known to man.

it would be unfair to whom? if it can only be purchased in lots of ten tons, then that is the only way anyone can purchase it. Anyone who has an SLA machine will have to buy it the same way as you, at the same price. That is fair.

If you go to ten different SLA modeling shops they will all quote you a fabrication price based on the amount of material you are going to use. They are not going to quote you a price based on ten tons if your job only needs 4 ounces.

what logic is there to this? I can have SLA parts fabbed by someone else if I pay for the 4 ounces of material and the labor, but I cant have them fabbed by my own team members (sponsor employees) unless I put down the cost for ten tons?!

I would like to be in the room when someone tells DK they did not allow the team to use their SLA machine, or their gear fab machine, or their CF molding machine, because of the way this rule was strangely worded.

If FIRST wanted us to put the cost of the smallest piece of stock available from which a part could be cut from, they would have said you must put the price of the whole piece on the BOM. The phrase "may be prorated " would have been dropped from the rule if the BOM cost was not proportional to the actual amount of material used.

So through the example, FIRST is telling us to use the MORE expensive cost for the part. This makes no sense.

It makes sense to me. I could tweak my BOM costs by prorating based on very large quanties of parts, when I only purchased one, or 5. The change to the rule from last year to this year put the Kibosh on accounting tricks, to keep the robot BOM realistic. If FIRST did not want teams to use SLA machines, CNC machines, gear fabrication machines.... they would come out and clearly say so. They would not bury a caviot in a rule about raw material prorating methods, so that teams would end up being disqualified because the raw materials their machine uses only comes in 55 gallon drums, or in railroad tanker cars, but a similar competitors machine has a supply chain with one gallon containers. When you end up in an absurd place like this its obvious you have taken a wrong turn interpreting the rules.