According to GS7a, a cone must be placed on a junction with the large opening toward the floor to score, and cones in other orientations are unscored.
According to GS10, a cone placed on an opponent’s unscored cone incurs a penalty (but that unscored cone can be removed without penalty).
This implies that if a team places a cone upside down on a junction – potentially a 33.5" tall one — that the opposing team cannot place a cone on that junction before removing your misplaced cone from the pole without getting a penalty. (Notice that you CAN place one of your cones on your own unscored cone without penalty. Peyton_Yeung points out scoring only depends on the cone being “secured”, so the new cone should be scored. 5 points - 10 point penalty = negative 5 points for placing a cone on tall junction that has an unscored cone on it.)
Note that if there is a scoring cone on a tall junction, then an unscored cone, you cannot merely run over the cone to remove the unscored cone — that would incur a penalty for removing the underlying scored cone.
The opens up the possibility of teams intentionally placing cones upside down on junctions to block their use by opposing teams (without incurring a penalty, anyway) that lack the ability to remove the offending cone — for instance, you could cap the two ground-level junctions nearest an opponent’s terminal with your two beacons , then place a single upside-down cone on the remaining uncapped post closest that terminal in order to impede the completion of their circuit — they most now either remove that cone or take a 10-point penalty to use the last available junction required to complete their circuit.
It also implies you could do things like place an upside-down cone on a junction that an opposing team reliably uses during autonomous mode if your robot was substantially faster than theirs and could sprint across the field to put an inverted cone there first.
Each minor penalty is 10 points — that means placing an inverted cone in this way would not only block your opponent from scoring but also get you 10 points (for their penalty) instead of the 5 you would get if you placed it on a tall junction.
Do you guys this this is the intention of GS7, or a mere oversight that will be corrected — i.e., the intent was for the rule not to apply to post junctions, but rather to prohibit you from placing your own cone on top of your opponent’s unused stack of 5 cones in the playing field?
If this is really the way the rule was intended, good teams will have to develop a lift capable of removing only unscored cone(s) from non-floor junctions, or risk being blocked off from using the tall junctions/completing their circuit without incurring a penalty.
(Cross posted to /r/ftc)
