"Open Source" Drive Systems

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Pavan

The benefits to rookie and veteran teams would be incredible. The veterans would keep designing more complex, efficient drive systems and the rest of the community would harness some of the concepts and develop a completely new drive system with a little bit of everything. This would than lead to more advanced drive systems and would raise the level of design as well as competition to a whole new bar.

I sort of disagree.

Lots of teams would just take the CAD drawings of something they know works, and go replicate it. They're not going to learn anything, other than how to machine parts from a print.

A lot of teams would improve on the design however, but the teams who are likely to do so are already the ones who would be practicing iterative design in the first place.

This would be good in the event that the kit drive is not robust, reliable, or very good (ie: the banebots before the carrier plate fix).