Would a robot on the blue alliance be allowed to contact the red alliance launch pad (or vice versa)? I looked through the manual, and unless it was mentioned in a team update it seems to not be clarified one way or the other.
It’s fine as far as I know. I thought we had gotten a penalty for shoving our opponent into our own launchpad (forcing to break a rule), but I realized it wasn’t called. 2020 safe zones were a bit stricter.
If there is no penalty for directly contacting the opponents’ launch pad in the rules, then it’s fair game.
However, you don’t get any protection…
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But you do deny the opposing robot from being able to shoot from a protected zone. In practice I think this is difficult to use very often, or it wasn’t used often, to my surprise. I figured one defender would try to hog the hangar protected spot (the closest to the hub at least) while the other robots on that defender’s alliance would try to do open-floor harassment but that meta never developed.
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This is exactly why I was asking. When we played at 10,000 lakes, I had a much harder time defending against teams that would retreat to the launch pad. I never wanted to touch them when they were on the launch pad, and I didn’t touch it myself because I thought it might be a penalty. If I could have gotten between them and their launch pad, I would have stopped them from scoring as much.
Three rules come to mind that may explain why this wouldn’t be effective, or at least kept teams from trying it. Sorting from niche to mainstream:
- Two robots can’t block them both; that would violate G203 (don’t collude … to shutdown…).
- Many mid-rung and higher climbers could have shut this down via G208 - contacting the mid-rung and the launch pad blocker at the same time would draw a free traversal climb. That’s 15 points and a ticket to keep cycling cargo until the buzzer.
- And finally, if you’re sticking to that launch pad, you aren’t defending anywhere else! Unless the robot was dependent on the launch pad for range as well as protection, you really aren’t defending much anyway.
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I definitely agree, and I wasn’t thinking that sitting on their launchpad would be a good strategy. I was thinking about staying close to the team I’d be defending, but between them and their launch pad. I had the issue where I was between them and the hub, and they could just touch the launch pad and get 2 free shots. Staying between them and the launch pad would hopefully prevent that in more cases.
Sitting on the launchpad does prevent them from being able to use it. However, be very careful that only one robot is blocking access to the launchpads or your risk a violation of G203.
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