At the end of Day 1, the decision we are all facing is simple: Gears or Fuel? Which will pose the easiest way to get both rank and match points?
What I want from you is simple: today, at the end of the night, what is your team leaning to.
6065 is leaning very heavily towards gears
what about doing both
Currently, 2910 is thinking about that but making gears passive and by opportunity only. Basically we won’t go out of our way to get a gear but if we have one we’ll try and score with it.
The way I see it, it can’t hurt to be prepared for a strategy change, so if we can manipulate both game pieces why not?
I think, at least right now, that the gears are probably more important as they are of higher point value and there are a significant number of them, but neglecting the fuel seems like a poor decision to me. I think that systems for both fuel handling and gear handling hold great value on a robot and both will be present on well performing robots. Something to keep in mind here is that the gears are limited, there are only so many of them that are worth moving and a gear by itself scores nothing, it must be placed and have the others in the chain to go with it. The fuel on the other hand does score each piece as an individual and there is an unlimited supply.
I foresee, especially at high levels of play, all four rotors turning on pretty quickly in the match and the robots moving to all shooting fuel by the end.
The thing that I’ve noticed, (and seems somewhat odd, to be honest) is that if the pre placed gears on the tower are allowed to be moved, in addition to the gear placed on the floor of the air ship (a total of 4 gears), a team would be capable of achieving 2 rotors turning during the teleop period, accounting for 80 points, despite never having actually scored a gear.
This is interesting, as in playoffs it would close the gap of point difference between the value of a RP from gears vs an RP from fuel
We decided to do gears; we don’t know that we have the capability to do both and would rather be good at something. If we conquer gears rapidly (it would be a miracle), then we could look to expand to fuel as well.
I think a lot of teams are going to prioritize gears over fuel. My concern with this is that gear-specific robots are a lot easier to defend against. There is no key to provide any protection, and your only choice to acquire gears is to traverse the field multiple times. I doubt we will see more than 2 rotors activated early on.
I’m leaning towards being able to do both:
Tentative Qual matches strategy: get 2-3 rotors spinning (only have to deliver 2-6 gears, seems doable) then shoot fuel as much as possible before climbing. I say only 2-3 rotors because I think that 4 will be very difficult to attain for your average quals alliances, needing to deliver 13 gears.
My team was thinking about what an Einstein alliance would look like. The general thought was that you would have 2 gear bots, both which can do some fuel cycling after they get the 12 gears, then a dedicated fuel shooter who can cycle quickly, probably high goal but maybe low. Also probably at least two climbers.
- Climb
- Gears
- Fuel high
prototyping may change this.
We will not forget playing some D
I think that if there is a good way to do gears with a completely passive mechanism, most teams will have the resources to make effective mechanisms for both gears and balls.
Einstein teams will need to deliver 15 gears 
My team (3019) has decided to go for gears and here is our logic:
For autonomous the gear is a clear winner, even if you shot and made all ten high goal shots in auto that is only 10 points, and if you shot all ten in low goal that is even worse at 3 points. Getting a single gear and turning the first rotor on nets you 60 points, vastly outclassing either other option. Of course you could try to get all ten in top goal, and get the gear in auto but to us it seems like having a shooter/pickup mechanism for fuel leaves little room for climbing and gear processing on the robot.
For teleop we made 2 scenarios. The more realistic scenario allots 30 seconds for a gear “cycle” consisting of moving to the pickup bin, getting a gear, and bringing it back. This would allow 4 gears per teleop for a total of 5 gears per match, which nets 2 and 3/4 rotors, effectively 100 points with 140 if one teammate can place one gear(considering you start with one reserve gear,per match R1 needs 1 gear, R2 needs 2, R3 needs 6, and R4 needs 12). Our next, more optimistic scenario would be cutting down that cycle time to around 20 seconds, allowing us to score 5 gears in teleop and 1 in auto for a total of 6 gears/3 rotors at effectively 140 points ourselves, with 35 seconds left to climb for another possible 50 points, netting a total of 190 points.
In my opinion, the fourth rotor is going to be very difficult to achieve- you need a total of 12 gears delivered and it is hard to get 6 with one bot (note: these are very rough numbers we tossed around to get an idea of fuel vs. gears) requiring two bots to be doing gears all match. That means that we would have to devote 2/3 of the alliance power to gears that would only net another 40 points, or 40 points and a RP if the remaining single bot was able to accumulate 40 kPa on it’s own (very unlikely).
In the end, our goal is looking like aiming for 6 gears/match and climbing!
I don’t think you should think about just the points. Think about the kPA too. If you put the gear on during auto, you do get those 60 points, which sounds like a dream because it’s so easy. But consider this.
You score 10 points, but also gain 10 kPA. You’re 50 points behind what you would be, yet 10 kPA closer to threshold pressure of 40. Now in teleop, you collect a gear, and put it on the peg. Now you get the 40 points because the rotor is on. So we’re at 10 kPA and 50 pts (10 pts behind). If you went with the gear, you’d need to shoot 30 balls in to catch up to kPa.
all but one gear on the airship cannot be moved, they are held down where they are in the gear train. you can only choose where one of the gears goes
That is a very valid point, my main argument there is that you have to have a semi-fast shooter to make all 10 reliably within 15 seconds. Obviously the dream would be to place a gear and instantly get your team 10kPa both during auto. The kPa is pretty valuable considering it would take 3 to 9x more balls to get that amount in teleop. I think shooting for high goal in auto is a good option, i would just like to explore it more and see how difficult it would be with starting position, for example whether you could start in a good spot to fire the 10. Even if the main focus of my teams theoretical bot is gears, a 10kPa lead would be very nice and look much better than pure gears in finals/championships. Thank you for the input!
Actually, the autonomous gear is worth 60 points. This means that after you place the first gear in teleop, you’re still at a 20 point deficit. Now you need to score 60 balls in the top goal to balance the score. While this is doable, it’s still a significant inequality. The one rank point earned by reaching 40 kPA is nice, but not as good two rank points from simply winning the match.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from my reading of the rules I haven’t found anywhere that states that the pre populated gears are fixed to the airship, nor any rules restricting moving them. I would find it interesting if they were not allowed to be moved as they would seem somewhat pointless, except in the regard that they could be taken away as the level of play increases at champs. On the other hand, if there are no rules restricting their movement, i’m sure that’s something that will be clarified.