Penalty for raising tetra higher than player station?

[AmyPrib]

I have a suggestion for the "breaking the plane", safety issue for being over the wall.

Why couldn't the rule just read:

"If you blatantly dangle a tetra over the player station, or drop one over the player station, or fling one outside the playing field, you will be assessed 10pt penalty."

In my opinion, that would take away any "marginal judgement call" to be made by a ref, and it would be obvious when a robot should receive a penalty. Then you won't have these cases where you break the plane by 1cm, in a safe manner (yes - clearly safe), and be disabled.

It would be a pretty clear-cut definition of this whole issue and it would be clear to teams and spectators that they broke a rule.

[Andy Baker]

In Las Vegas, this past weekend "breaking the plane of the alliance station wall" was called like this:

If a team posed a safety hazard in this situation, they were to be given a 10 point penalty and disabled. I was a ref on the "blue" side of the field, and this never was called.

However, teams did "break the plane" with a bit of their robot or a portion of a tetra. Of these cases, none were more than a couple of inches past the plane. Therefore, in each case, we thought that no safety hazard was present. However, whenever this was seen, we told the teams about it and said that if the tetra or arm was farther over the wall, there could be a penalty called. The competing teams heeded this warning and did a good job of keeping the situation safe.

This call simply needs some common sense. If a tetra breaks a plane by 1 cm, as Amy said above, it is not a safety hazard and therefore should not be penalized.

Andy B.