Our Team Needs Help on the Drive!

[swamp_child]

Originally Posted by ExarKun666

Okay, today our team decided on a drive for, what is to be our chaise drive train. the layout looks like:
|\-------/|
|-|-----|-| Front
|o|---- |o|
|--|----|--|
|--\___/--|
|oo-----oo| Back
________

(This is not to scale, the little - just is a space, so ignore them))

Okay the circles are the wheels, the back four wheels in the back will be powered on a chain, and the front two wheels will be none powered and will be held in a straight position, not free on a caster mechanism. Before our team dives into creating this, I was hoping for some feed back, this is essentially 2 back wheel tank drive. So here are my questions?

1) What advantages do you see with this drive?
2) Should the front and back wheels be powered or just the back ones?
3) is there a thread, or some specifics to way a tank drive is bad for this competition?
4) With the layout above, where would you put the wheels, which ones would be powered, and what kind of drive would you recommend for this base layout?

TY so much to all who respond, are team is rly in a fix on this, and can't rly decide, and answering these questions, would help us SOOO much, ty again!

1.Not to be crazy harsh, but i see just about no advantage to this drive
2. You need to power every wheel touching the ground this year. Depending on how your weight is displaced, you will be giving up tons of traction by not powering wheels. For example if you have around 20% of your weight over the middle of the bot, you could be losing upwards of 20% of your traction, which is a lot in this game.
3.Ill tell you right now why. The latteral coefficient of friction is nearly twice that of the normal CoF.

[ExarKun666]

Originally Posted by swamp_child

1.Not to be crazy harsh, but i see just about no advantage to this drive
2. You need to power every wheel touching the ground this year. Depending on how your weight is displaced, you will be giving up tons of traction by not powering wheels. For example if you have around 20% of your weight over the middle of the bot, you could be losing upwards of 20% of your traction, which is a lot in this game.
3.Ill tell you right now why. The latteral coefficient of friction is nearly twice that of the normal CoF.

Question for you, or anyone who can answer, for the above layout, elt's say the scale from the very, very front of the robot is (the two points you see in my pic) let's say that's 28 inch apart and the U cut out in the center of the bot was 14 inches wide.
5) How would you then get power to the 2 front wheels?
6) Is there another way to model this layout to have that U cutout, but still have a set of front wheels, that are powered?
7) Still not sure as to what drive our team should consider