ELEVATED but not hanging?

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

Another interesting way to think about suspended is this:

Let's say robot 1 is elevated such that the bottom of the robot is at 24" by doing a pull-up on one of the horizontal bars on the tower. It now "sticks out its tongue (made of LEXAN, of course) and lays on the platform. If it stays within the 85 inches and another robot drives on the platform and is only on the LEXAN, then that robot is SUSPENDED and worth 3 points. The totla for that maneuver is 5 points.

Curse you Copioli! I thought of that right after my last post and was hoping it'd go unnoticed. As for your second post... Stop stealing my team's design ideas. Sadly, I don't think we'll be able to fit ramps AND an effective red (or blue) carpet into the 84" cylinder, so we'll likely leave this to some other team to try. Still, it seems like a reasonable gamble, though the team on the platform would have to be pretty careful to only touch your red carpet.

Seconding your reply to Dana, I obviously agree with my interpretation of the rules as written. As written the rules say nothing at all about hanging, support, or any of the other terminology the GDC has used in past games where hanging was involved. There's been 4 games I can recall where you got points for hanging/being above something. I'm thinking that if the GDC intended for ELEVATED to mean fully supported by the tower and above the platform, they could have drawn on prior rules to write it up that way. Similar on SUSPENDED.

I'm perfectly willing for the GDC to prove me wrong here, but doing so is going to involve a massive redefinition of ELEVATED and SUSPENDED. If the only motivation for doing so is to prohibit a moderately clever strategy that's still rather technically challenging*, then I'll be somewhat miffed with the GDC. Which has certainly happened before, but I remain ever hopeful.

*If you don't believe me, wait 6 weeks then tell me 57's system is simpler than a hook and a hanging bar.