Deadlock

[Garii]

I'm finding that my teams meetings (3044) are becoming slightly less productive and slightly more argumentative. The fact of the matter is that this will be our sophomore year. So I'm looking for an unbiased opinion on this matter.

Heres the story, I am one of the programmers on Team 3044. I use NI Labview, I also mentor for the team. One of the big discussions is what we'd like to do as far as moving around the field (basically do we want to utilize the bumps or tunnels) unfortunately this is a topic I have no support for, I voted tunnels. However everyone seems deadest on using the bumps and I'm quite alright with that.

The other topic of choice is how to "kick" or get the balls in the goal. I (and most of the programming team) voted to use a motor controlled "ram" to get the balls just enough jolt to get it into the goals, however the rest of the class is more interested in implementing pneumatics this year, the reason programmers are so against it is because of a lack of communication, we feel that we don't have experience in that field of programming nor do we have experience with that system at all. Kinda seems like something we should experiment with post competition.

The final Topic that I'm going to mention is the wheels, One group is in favor of using 6 wheels, one is in favor of tank treads, I had suggested two wheel drive for 360 degrees of movement because I felt tank wheels would make us slow, bulky, not to mention its a lot of custom parts for a team only in its 2nd year

So I felt I should get an unbiased opinion from some experienced people.
pros and cons?
Setbacks?
Maybe even what your team is considering this year

sorry if this was long or its in the wrong board