Purchase/Prebuild - What's the difference?

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski

Personally I would hope that all the teams would try to do their best to uphold the values of FIRST. Unfortunately to try to play on the possibilities of what could be done to circumvent the rules would be infinite....there are only so many things FIRST can control with these type of rules. This rule you propose is only effective if you assume everyone is doing their best to follow the rules. What happens when they try to circumvent those rules? well then we have to make another rule.....and around and around we go making up rules we do not have the resources to patrol...

If a team wanted to get around certain rules they could because FIRST doesn't have the resources to patrol this. Unfortunately you have to assume that ppl are going to do the right thing or else we all will dip down into a paranoid state....All I'm saying this rule you propose is simply unrealistic, and you must rely on the fact that people are doing positive things with this experience/opportunity....there are simply too many rules that people could find a loopholes in, and I am not prepared to go on a witch hunt for these types of rules....

This all goes back is the competition just a competition? Well then let's start clamping down or we can understand the competition is a portion but there are other parts to this (Chairman's Award/Engineering Inspiration)....you won't win either of these awards with an off-the-shelf part....the only possible benefit will occur in the competition, and if that is your only goal I personally believe you have missed something.

The point isn't to write rules to impose upon those who would break them anyway. It's to have rules that are understood uniformly by all.

The rules must be clearly defined, so that we don't have situations where a difference of opinion, or a misunderstanding causes friction between parties acting in good faith. Look at the 60/254 situation: it was within the rules, but some argued vehemently that it was against the "spirit of FIRST" and would lead to the competition's ruin.

If those (or any other) teams wanted to cheat, no rule would prevent it. That hypothetical proposition in my last post referred to the situation that MikeDubreuil mentioned, wherein a team buys all of its parts after the start of the season. It isn't meant to prevent cheating--it's meant to suggest a concrete limit to what can and cannot be done before the Kickoff (a limit which is obviously ill-defined--hence this thread).

Originally Posted by Marc P.

I do understand that it makes logistical sense to purchase parts that are tested, proven, and affordable, and I don't deny the benefits thereof in terms of building a successful robot. But how would things like the X-Prize be if one team decided they could (hypothetically) just buy the plans for the space shuttle from NASA, or the Soyuz from Russia. Sure, they would accomplish the set goal, but how would that help our efforts of developing new and better ways of getting into space?

How does a team strike a balance between innovation and practicality? If an X-Prize team could build and launch a space shuttle or a Soyuz within the constraints of that competition, and could do so profitably--then that would be excellent. Of course, it simply isn't possible. And that's a clear message that innovation is needed.

Contrast that with FIRST. While the pinnacle of robot design does tend to rise from year to year, there is no comparable situation where nothing exists to accomplish the task (as in the X-Prize analogy). For this reason, a team may well be justified in believing that a derivative work would suffice, where a full-blown innovation is simply too risky. We don't require innovation; we simply encourage it.

Some teams have the means to innovate wildly, and still manage to build upon their failures (188 team members may recall Blizzard 4, late in the 2003 build season...)--others are too busy going about FIRST's business through more mundane means. Either way, they need to be well informed of the expectations that they will have to meet, so that they can choose a comfortable level of risk and innovation, and also so that the FIRST community understands and accepts their actions at face value, without the controversy that permeates this topic.