legality of bolt and screw heads breaking plane of chassis meeting bumpers

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

Also, when asking for the reasoning, you might want to consider "because we said so" as a valid answer, lest your customer take his multi-billion dollar buisiness elsewhere. You see there may be many possible reasons why they cannot disclose information to you (IP issues?). Consider this just a design constraint.

Maybe I should have stressed more that issues in life like this are never white-and-black, but usually blurry grey areas that need context on a case-by-case analysis.

Doing any kind of classified work with need to know basis obviously means you don't ask questions and just do your job. But for non defense/classified work, I've seen first hand or heard of many other stories where the given specs were indeed misguided, and upon further back-and-forth questioning, a mutually beneficial agreement was found.

One such case a professor of mine told me recently, was of a large manufacturing corporation contracting out work for a french fry sorting machine. But when one did the math, their requested weight tolerance for the bag of french fries was 1/4 the weight of a single french fry. How would you bag something as multifarious as french fries and keep a weight tolerance of 1/4 of a french fry? Had my professor's company simply accepted these specs without asking questions, they would have had to create an unnecessarily complex sorting machine to sort individual french fries by weight and bag them one at a time, possibly with a french fry slicer to cut fries in half to get within the given weight specs. This would have been a much slower and more expensive machine than would have been necessary, and would have cost the client more money (both initially and in annual O&M costs) and possibly would have cast the contracted company in a bad light for coming up with an unnecessarily complex and expensive solution. But...

When they asked their client and showed them the math that the given specs were +/- 1/4 of a french fry, the client acknowledged the error and redid the specs to allow a wider error range.

For myself personally, I've worked for a company which produced an integrated system for clients that lacked X feature which all competitors had, but only because our integrated system was better designed to eliminate the need for X feature without any side effects other than a cheaper bottom line. Because most competitors had X feature, bids would often come in requesting this given feature, despite the fact that X feature was notorious for never actually working in the environment they were subject to. Nearly all of the time, when we talked to the clients and explained that our system was designed in a way to eliminate the need for X feature, saving initial and O&M costs, and that most competitors' X feature would almost always fail within three months of installation (and would then be bypassed anyway by the client's technicians), the clients would come to a mutual understanding and accept our bid.

Thus, it's all about context. Sometimes it's appropriate to question the given specs to better serve the customer (potentially saving them money), other times just do your job and don't ask questions.

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

All in all, you might consider just putting your efforts into making sure that those who didn't follow the letter of the rule still get on the field, rather than bash those who put the design constraint in place.

Both can be done without negatively affecting each other. And I understand your reasoning on this; plenty of times in the past I've posted that teams shouldn't whine when other teams have "better" robots or "better" facilities, but they should instead work harder to become one of those said teams. But for those cases, that's an example where the cause for the individuals' whining can be directly attributable to their own specific actions (e.g. if they work harder, they can fix the situation they are in). In this case, no matter how hard one works, the bumper rules are still the bumper rules, and thus it's acceptable to "whine" to make sure those who could rectify the situation have a true understanding of the impact of said rule on the community at large.

I've personally always been one who calls things like they see it. Maybe it's blunt, but it's better to get right to the point than dance around the tree sugarcoating problems and hiding how they truly impact the affected people or entities. Bolt heads behind bumpers are completely understandable, and so is the allocation for small pockets in the plywood backing to allow bumpers to sit flush for strength reasons.

But when the rules as written would not even allow for a 1/16" high button-style rivet head above or below the bumpers... that's just a needlessly restriction on FIRST teams. 50-75% of robots should not show up at their first event unknowingly illegal; if it does occur, then that's obviously a sign the rules were too bloated and/or full of ambiguities to be comprehended by the average Joe FIRSTer.