[YMTC]: [YMTC] A Precarious Placement

[ChrisH]

You Make The Call (YMTC) is a series of situations where you are the official and make the call.
Please reference specific rules when applicable. The results of YMTC are not official and are for educational purposes only.

This YMTC is based on a real incident at the Arizona Regional.

Blueabot 3's robot is not up to a match yet, so their trailer stands vacant in front of Redabot 1's Payload Specialist. As Autonomous begins the PS starts pumping moon rocks into the trailer. One of the moon rocks lands on top of the vision target and remains balanced there. The moon rock is obviously completely supported by the trailer and therefore is worth 2 points.

The question: If a Bluabot should bump into the trailer, knocking the moon rock off its precarious perch and onto the floor, should they be penalized for de-scoring? What if they are pushed into the trailer by another robot, red or blue?

When the moon rock balanced, some of us at the Scoring table had a short debate about the outcome, but the moon rock stayed up there for the entire match so the Refs never had to rule on it and we never came to a conclusion either, something about resetting for the next match.

In the absence of a precedent, You Make The Call!

Note for Newbies: YMTC has been a regular feature over the past several years and serves to make people aware of tricky situations in the rules. The remarkable clarity of this year's rules, along with the reduction in the number of possible penalties have caused YMTC to be dormant for most of this season. But when this situation occured, I just could not resist posting it. There are some interesting possibilities here ...