Drive train questions

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by BJC

Actully, I disagree. I think that your robot should be geared to go as fast as the drivers can control it. If you look at teams such as 67, 1114, and 254 (just off the top of my head) they all have extreamly fast drivetrains that they can all control very well. This is generally because their drivers are very experienced from a combination of past seasons and practice robot driving.
Because games in FIRST are unfailingly "who can do more/faster" senerios if you want to win you have to go fast. So if you are really good but not that fast you can never hope to be as good as the robots that are both.

As for low gear make it low enough to push stuff but not low enough that other robots can run away, that aside its all preferance.

my 2 cents

I agree with you in principle, that a team should build a robot to be as fast as can be controlled. However I would assume that a team asking how fast they should gear their robot probably does not have the driver experience to handle a robot that's faster than 10-12 ft/s, which is remarkably fast.

Here's the mandatory "it depends on the game" disclosure: if it's a wide-open field, like 2008, where a robot can get up to speed and maintain that speed for a good portion of the match then a very fast robot would be more useful. If it's a segmented field, much like 2010, where there is not as much room to accelerate and maintain a high speed, a robot might be more effective (i.e. have a higher average speed) if it could reach a lower top speed faster.