At the Midwest Regional Drivers’ Meeting on Thursday team #71 proabably asked the best question of the year:
"If a goal is blocking your chute can your human player use a 5 point ball to push it out? Since you aren’t touching the goal, the ball is."
The refs didnt have an answer right away but they came back with this:
"It’s legal, as long as the human player doesn’t cross the plane into the field."
This helped out alot of teams.
But with 1 ball would you be able to push the goal far enough away to make a difference?
That is very interesting, but the decision will prob be up to the judges of each regional.
this was also brought up during the UTC driver’s meeting were the refs only said that according to the rules a human player can not touch the goal nor pass the plane. There was nothing mentioned about a HP using a ball to move the goal in the rule book, just another loophole gone unnoticed.
Probably not enough to push it far enough out to make a significant difference, but it will get it out enough to make it much easier for the driver to push the goal completely out and away. That’s a really good question. I’ll mention that to our human players.
Like I said I am not too sure how much use this actually is. this was confirmed at UTC with being possible and legit yet I never saw any HP actually doing this. Just the logistics of it in trying to manipulate it to get your hand down there through the metal holder and not brake the plane I would imagine would be difficult unless you actually lie down and go at it like a pool stick but even then if you got a tall HP you might risk “stepping” outside the player station. plus in that two minutes your brain is goin so fast unless you are specifically thinking of this rule you will probably forget and focus more on pushing balls in your alliances corral to hand to you if you really are that good.
In one of the SF rounds at the Midwest Regional I personally used a 5pt ball to move one of the goals away and if you push hard enough and fast enough the elasticity of the ball also helps to move the goal farther. Even though I did not get any more balls through the chute in that match, the goal was far enough away to get 45 or 269 to push us some more balls through the chute. Thanks guys for picking us as your alliance partner and assisting us to the top. That was too cool!
I saw it done a few times at Midwest this past weekend … like Yan said, it made it easier for the robot to move the goal away from the corral - especially if it was jammed right up in that corner!
can use a ball to push another ball, to push the goal away?
They could use it to push the goal away, but in the end I don’t think it helped that much. Our human player tried it, but it didn’t work too well. Also, if it took the robot to go and finish the job of moving the goal, they were probably wasting time they could have spent herding balls into the other chute.
Thank God for that ruling it saved me once.
this point is irrelevant. simply have the balls delivered to the other human player, and have that human player pass it to your human player. simple, effective, doesn’t risk breaking any rules.
that’s what we did anyway…
not irrelevent… today I saw in the Can Reg practice one team who blocked both goals and we were stuck!
well if done correctly you can give the goal a hardy shove… a strong enough human player would be able to send it gliding along its way… it would be able to go far enough away that a robot would be able to wedge itself in to push the goal out. Or if it was a really good shove… out of the way completely.
Especially if the human player is not worried about losing the ball (saying the team is an awesome coraller but not a great goal mover ) This is an awesome sort of loophole… I will be exploiting this with all my alliances. Thanks for bringing it up!
I just talked with the director of (at least our event) the Can Reg. He said he doesn’t really see a problem, following that that you don’t touch that goal or cross that line
This was told originally to us in STL but we never used it. then we lost our hook for moving the goal because of weight and went with smaller less strong hooks that could move the goal but not remove it if the wheel was stuck in the corral but with a human player helping with a 5pt ball we could get it out.
our human player holds on to one ball until the last 10seconds for this reason.