Problem with Penalties

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII

You misunderstand me. I mean't a point penalty.

Teams that don't pass inspection are forced to go back and modify their robots so that they DO pass inspection. In other words they are FORCED to obey the rules. They can't incur penalties... Becuase if they were capable of incuring penalties they wouldn't be allowed to compete.


And if the teams are responsible for all the penalties than why wasn't this such a big deal last year?

Here's a simple experiment you can do. Do a CD search of all thread titles containing the word "penalties" or "penalty." Set the peramiters to any-date and older.

(The number corresponds to the number of threads)

2008: 13, 2007: 5, 2006: 7, 2005: 10, 2004: 2, 2003: 1, 2002: 1

So obvously penalties were a bigger issue to teams in the 05 and 08 games. There's a clear correlation between the game and the "penalty problems." That leads me to believe that the problem is not so much with the teams but with the games...

So, how do you propose making an inspection penalty for actions taken on the field? Your connection between inspection/robot penalties and game penalties is flawed at best.
There are really only a handful of rules that you could enforce in such a fashion (such as the 80" rule), but doing so would often eliminate a great deal of design flexibility (making it impossible to violate the 80" rule during inspection would eliminate most arm designs, as they had to raise above 80" to score, and if tipped over would violate the rule). It would be impossible to eliminate the possibility for line violations or hurdler interference during inspection.

Penalties required a little more discipline to follow this year than some past ones, but we still the fault of teams. 1712 used two different drivers this year, and the only <G22> penalty we incurred was during hybrid. So long as you kept focused and attentive, penalties were fairly easy to avoid.