paper: Stop the Stop Build

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by chapman1

Yet, smaller teams can still compete today - despite the "head start" the larger teams have - because their advantage is held to a specific period of time. If the amount of build days is extended any more, FRC might as well plan on an "elite" team-only competition - the gap between elites and the rest of the field would become so wide that smaller teams would have little hope of successfully competing.

I understand a lot of the points you have here and empathize with the struggles your team has from this position. But I just wanted to chime in at this part. It isn't true.

Your suggestion is that, on each given day, a "have not" team accomplishes X units of work while a "have" team accomplishes Y, where Y is greater than X (let's say, 2X). To you, the short build season means that you'll have 45*X hours, and they'll have 45*2X hours, and that the relative difference gets greater the longer the build season goes. But this isn't what's happening

In fact, right now, teams can get as much development time as they want, not just the six week build season. The catch is, they need to build a copy of their $3500 robot, and sink in roughly double the build time in the season, in order to do it. The time and financial luxury needed to do this is something that is certainly out of reach for a lot of the "have-nots" of FRC (at least, not without lots of hard work and dedicated, experienced leaders). Only a subset of FRC has this additional time available to them. Not all of them choose to use it, but many do.

So what's actually happening is, the have not teams have 45 days to work, and the have teams have over 100 days to work. This is a huge disparity, and right now, the have not teams have to work extremely hard to bring themselves up to a financial and time commitment level to get those extra days. All ending Stop Build Day would do, is to open this extended work window to every team. The powerhouse teams have to put in less work to get their 100 days, that's true - but the teams that couldn't do it at all suddenly have that option, and it results in a great improvement in quality and competitiveness if teams choose to use it.

Now, if no matter what, your team just can't build for more than 45 days a year, that's fine. Just don't build after some day. Teams across all the different levels of funding and competitiveness take varying amounts of time on and off depending on their needs. But should we stop the teams that want to continue working, but are stuck behind the $3500 wall between them and a practice robot?

If I could wave a magic wand and make it so that robots were built for 45 days, without any decrease in quality, and everyone got to take a break afterward, that would be really appealing. But we need to understand, that's not what's happening now, and we kind of have a worst of all worlds situation here.