paper: Spanking the Children

[Chadfrom308]

Originally Posted by Jay Meldrum

Very interesting read. Cool to read some of the history behind the penalties in past FIRST games.

I would agree with you on the 50 point penalties this year. They pretty much end the match for any team that gets one.

In Waterford, we received 50 points due to the other alliance ingesting our ball. This happened when someone on our alliance was trying to pick up the ball and pushed into the opposing teams intake. The crowd was very upset when they were given this penalty because it was clear they did not try to intake the ball, it was pushed up into them, even though the team that pushed it into them was trying to pick it up themselves.

Though the rules are very clear on this; G12..."A BALL that becomes unintentionally lodged on a ROBOT will be considered POSSESSED by the ROBOT. It is important to design your ROBOT so that it is impossible to inadvertently or intentionally POSSESS an opponent’s BALL."

This does make a very difficult design constraint for teams.

This happened to us. We were lined up for a shot against the 1pt goal and the other alliance tried to hit/block us when there was a ball in between us and they ended up pushing our ball out of the robot and forcing (not on purpose or not even accidentally) their ball into our robot.

They said it was called because of our intake roller was on, even though it needed to be on to give us the best shot and keep our ball in.

They said to us exactly what the rules said.

Though the rules are very clear on this; G12..."A BALL that becomes unintentionally lodged on a ROBOT will be considered POSSESSED by the ROBOT. It is important to design your ROBOT so that it is impossible to inadvertently or intentionally POSSESS an opponent’s BALL."

But the problem with that is if you make it hard to take in the opponent's ball, you make it hard to take in your ball.

This was also the game decider for that match (which would've been awesome because it was against 67)