Brainstorm: Improving the FRC bumper rules

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by Aren_Hill

Thats the biggest reason my vote goes under "optional", if a team feels the robot won't take a beating, easy answer, make bumpers.

The problem is that many of these teams that will build robots that can't take the punishment are the same teams that would not build bumpers for their robot.

I agree with much of what has already been said by others in this thread

1. Keep the red/blue bumpers all the way around. I would not be mad if they made building two sets mandatory and got rid of the covers, but I won't go so far as to suggest it be added.

2. Mandatory white numbers. For every team that loses their good looking non-whit numbers (eg. 67) 10 teams will be gaining clear readable numbers from both in the stands and on the webcast. We originally painted ours black, it looks fine in the shop. After watching webcasts we decided to repaint them white on Thursday.

3. Go back to 2009 style coverage % + cover every corner (dependent on game). In this game I think requiring full coverage was fine, I just hope it's not here to stay if the bumpers move back down.

4. Move bumper height back down. I'm just assuming this one will happen when the bumps disappear.

5. Allow "minor protrusions" along the entire projection of the frame perimeter as long as they're < 3/4". This should fix a lot of the nastiness that occurred this year (moving the bumpers back should help too.

6. Relax the fully supported rule. I would prefer they just let us figure out how to support them, but I would be ok with a % or a maximum span or both.