Ball Capacity? How Much is Too Much? And Can You Use It For A Strategical Advantage?

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

Except maybe if while your being pinned, you start to fire into the trailer of the robot thats pinning you... That may be enough to get them off your back for a bit.

Agreed, if it's the right type of pin.

[Rick Wagner]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

Except maybe if while your being pinned, you start to fire into the trailer of the robot thats pinning you... That may be enough to get them off your back for a bit.

Exactly. It's looking like our tracking shooter will be a defensive weapon this year! Come too close and you get scored on.

Speaking of defense, it's looking to me more and more that defense will be very important in this game. Strategies will be deep and layered, and commanders will have to look several moves deep, like a chess player. I'm beginning to think that ultimately strategies will come to be centered on keeping the opposing alliance from running empty cells. Then you will get attack escorts for the empty cell runners, and so on. Winning alliances may have to field three empty cell runners (with attack capability perhaps) to ensure a decisive edge.

[thefro526]

I'm glad this thread is making people think.

Here's my personal theory on Ball Capacity:

For many, if not most teams, gathering balls should be much easier than scoring on an opponent's trailer. (Assuming there are balls to be gathered) This means that it's going to require more effort and time to score than it will to gather balls. So, I believe that it's better to hoard as many balls as your design allows and then score as many as you can in one instant. IE, instead of scoring 5 balls 4 times why not try to score 10 balls twice? I'm not saying that my team is going to try to gather 20 balls and then score them at one time but if the opportunity arose we would jump on it.

Also, another scenario that pops into my head is this:

You pin an opponent down, and you have 17 balls in your robot. The opposing robots pulls away from you and you've only managed to score 8 of the balls in your robot. You now have 9 more balls you can score once you track another trailer down. This plays into the game very well because as the match goes on there will be fewer and fewer balls available due to scoring.

Here's my basic rule, Any ball in your robot can't be used against you but can be used against your opponent.

[commodoredl]

In our team's design review, we felt that the robot should at least be able to handle every moon rock given to the team at once. (7 starting plus 13 in the player station)
If your robot could only store 7 balls, say, then if a scoring opportunity doesn't arise, the robot can't do much. It has to try to reach an opponent or else it can't do anything. If a robot has larger capacity, it can spend time during a match collecting more balls to prepare for scoring opportunities. And there's also the point of needing to reload more with less capacity.
Our robot should be able to hold around 24 balls.

[xc4life]

I am under the impression that the number of balls you have does not mean anything. What you are capable of doing with them is what matters.

For example, one team could hoard all of the balls but end up losing because they are unable to accurately fire them into opposing trailers.

I would be shooting for accuracy, not quantity in this competition.

[JAZAD1]

Are team wants to surprise everyone at VCU so I don't want to give to much a way about all the magic but I believe that our robot can hold around 9 to 10.

Just a question to all of the teams that are saying that they can hold 20+ orbital balls where are you finding the space to do all of this? We have tried to maximize all of the area we are allotted per the rules while still keeping it KISS.

Throughout the weeks that we have already gone through our robot design has changed substantially based on; Delphi talk, our very giving engineers and mentors, as we did all of this the slop in the robot that could be used for electrical and other stuff... started to become small and few in between. Which means that we have had to start to become creative to get everything we want into the robot to fit in the space. (Which is never a bad thing because that is the fun part about FIRST the challenge of building a robot) Anyway with all of the space saving and magic inside of the robot we can still accomplish our game goals (we think, although no one really knows whats going to happen) throughout the match with the set up that we have.

I personally feel that the robots that keep everything simple and are able function in any environment no matter the situation (robots that can change on the fly,in the pits, or on the ice ha ha ha) will succeed because of the easily adaptable robot.

[Michael Corsetto]

Personally, I think the KISS-er you make your bot, the more balls you *should* be able to store. We have 5 motors, no pneumatics, and all of our electronics and motors below 9 inches. As previously stated, we have a ~40 ball capacity. As you can imagine, pretty much everything above that 9 inch mark is ball storage/scoring mechanism. Of course, some scoring methods lend themselves to more or less ball capacity, depending on the size of the mechanisms required.