2008 Boston Regional

[raceteen48]

I thought Boston was an awesome regional, a lot of younger teams there than Manchester, I know we sure did a lot better, we got it all figured out in time for Boston i felt, and had a good time. thanks to 69 for picking us in the Selections, and thanks to 2084 for being a great alliance partner, i think we had a great alliance out there.

I do however have a question about certain penalties that I am confused about.
in one of our QF matches 69 got called for "Impeding a Hurdle" on team 125, which i was kind of confused about, because they are a launcher robot, and therefore i asked a referee later what the definition of "Hurdling" is, and he said "Hurdling is when the ball is just off the floor, now that seemed wrong to me, and when i got home i saw this on the First forums.

"The act of completing a HURDLE. To be considered in the process of HURDLING, the ROBOT must:

* be in its own HOME STRETCH, and
* be in POSSESSION of a TRACKBALL, and
* be moving toward the OVERPASS and/or elevating the TRACKBALL so that the top of the TRACKBALL is higher than the LANE DIVIDER."

now to me, that says that the robot has to have the ball ABOVE the lane divider, so therefore, a shooter robot should hypothetically never get a penalty called against someone else for impeding them in hurdling.

we also had one point in a match where we were hurdling, and a robot hit us, they never got called, we asked Benge and he said "it was incidental Contact" now i never saw anywhere in the rules where it specified whether it was incidental or not made a difference, especially when we were the only robot on that side and they could have gone left or right of us.

also, how does the "Contact outside the bumper zone" work? In SF2 Match 2, in like the last 5 seconds of the match, we were trying to take the Red ball down from the overpass, and 1153's arm got caught in our robot, actually holding onto our battery cable. we were then unable to knock the ball off, and as i understood it, if you have an attachment outside the starting size limitations, and it hits/interferes with another robot especially being INSIDE their robot, you should get a ten point penalty, and yet they didn't, Benge even had to step OVER their arm to leave the circle of judges, and then i even pointed it out to a ref, who responded with "We already gave them a penalty for something" then they posted the score, and he said "still want that penalty" and then they took the score down, and changed it, and they actually won, so we argued with Benge and he just said "we call it as we see it guys" and i walked over to the ref i had talked to earlier and said "ya, i want it called now" and he just said that he talked to Benge and Benge made up his mind but he would talk to him again. i do not know if he did or not, i was really upset about this, since they never gave us a reason other than "they already called them for a penalty (which was impeding a hurdle btw). since when can a team only get called one penalty against them? even if wouldn't effect the match outcome? I feel that we really missed out on a third match that should have been played, and might have changed the outcome of the whole regional.