All right, I’ll take a stab at this.
First: Define the goal/mission.
Second: Define the target audience.
Third: Details.
First: I’m thinking of challenging FIRST directly. So the goal is to inspire as many people as possible, and allow them to work with more-experienced persons to do well.
Second: Ah, why not. All ages target (let’s put the low cap at about 6 years, no top end).
Third: The gory details.
First, I recognize that a bunch of 6 year olds can’t hang with a bunch of PEs. So in order to make this work, the entire competition will be divided into classes by age/experience.
Peewee: 6 years to 7th grade.
Club: 8th grade to end of high school.
Semi-pro: College (including grad students)
Pro: Post-college
In general, a team must have a 2:1 ratio of in-level to above-level members or greater. So a 10-person peewee team can have up to 3 members in club, semi-pro, or pro age bands, for example. Want more pros on the team? Move up a level to Club, or recruit more Peewee students. “Organization sponsor” is exempt, as are “parts sponsors”. Pro level is allowed to have semi-pro, club, and peewee members. That sort of thing. Youth Protection included.
The game would be substantially the same between levels, with the primary difference being scale and robot size. Games would be on a 2-year cycle, where the game is played once, then replayed the following year with “minor” twists and improvements (example: 2015 replayed with light defense allowed through elimination of the center section of the Step)–and robots from the previous year of a cycle would be legal as-is. Each game would have 3 play conditions: Driver, Auto, and Integrated which is a certain length of Auto followed by Driver. Teams MUST play Integrated and one of Driver and Auto; the other is optional but encouraged.
Teams would only compete within their classes at any given event, but all classes would be welcome. Depending on the setup, two field sizes might be required, but a well-designed field would allow for the smaller field to be set up on the larger one if the venue was on the smaller side.
Peewee and Club would play at about 2/3 the scale of SemiPro and Pro. Peewee would be limited to pre-fabricated parts (with modifications along the lines of expanding holes and bending parts); Club would be allowed to build parts to interface with those. SemiPro would be allowed to use just about any part; Pro would need to build at least some items that SemiPro can just buy, or provide an engineering justification for buying.
Overall robot rules would be primarily safety, transport packaging, and a couple of engineering constraint (size rules). Games would be designed to reduce penalties by reducing strategic benefit of undesired actions wherever possible. The smaller robots would be restricted to smaller motors than their larger cousins.
Sizing overall, let’s say about 2/3 the size of an FRC field currently for the larger robots. If I had to set up a venue, it’d be a gym plus cafeteria/second gym, with the smaller robots in the latter for pits, or even playing.
Oh, and one other curveball. Any given organization could play as many teams as they wanted. However, they would have to play one team per class that they serve BEFORE they could play two teams in one class.