I’m trying to precut a bunch of ropes for my team’s first event this weekend, but I’m having trouble with the measurements.
I understand that the distance from the touchpad to the floor is 4’ 10", but does anyone know how long a rope (from its retaining feature) would have to be to reach from the floor, through the touchpad, around the 90 degree angle and into the davit fingers? I haven’t found any information regarding how far it is from the touchpad to the davit.
Thanks in advance!
you can measure it in the field cad model. I know a number of teams (including ours) just asked to measure on the field directly during load-in day. (during when you can measure any element of the field)
In the end we ended up making a slack slipknot, so we made all of our ropes too long and put the extra rope in the slack.
Our climber drum is ~10.5 off the floor and we made our rope ~73 inches or so long from the end of our retaining feature.
if it helps our rope is 65 inches from bottom of retaining feature to the end of the catch loop. our climber is 18 inches off the ground.
Per the rule book, the minimum length from the retaining feature to the end of the rope is 63".
Our event allowed each team to have up to 6 ropes ‘approved’ and tagged at one time. We had 3 on hand.
Be aware: there is a 90 degree bend approximately 2 inches from the retention fingers. It will wear your rope horribly especially if your driver keeps cranking on the winch. Our judges condemned one rope after it was starting to cut on this point.
Our experience with our rope was a life expectancy of only 6 matches but I saw one team that only got two matches from a rope before failure. Hopefully our second rope design will be more robust.
Good Luck.
Looking at the field element drawings I came up with 79 inches from the back of the davit fingers (air ship side) to the floor.
I do not know what event you were at but there is no rule limiting the number of ropes you can have inspected and tagged at an event.
The inspection sheet has that many blanks, I believe.
We had no issues inspecting more than six ropes (I think we had 11 at our last event). The inspectors just asked us go to the back of the line after each rope if there were other teams waiting.
An observation. Lots of climb fails are not due to the mechanisms but to delay in snagging the ropes. It seems as if ropes that are swinging free are especially bad. Now, with a high configuration there is not a lot to be done, but for robots with a climber further down, having the end of the rope actually rest on the floor will make it stand still almost right away. A heavier than absolutely necessary knot at the far end helps too. Seconds count.
T. Wolter
I04. ROPES have to be inspected. A Team must submit any ROPE they intend to use in a MATCH
for Inspection. A ROPE must meet the following criteria (see Figure 9-2 for letter references):
B. be designed/configured to be at least 5 ft. 3 in. (~160 cm) long measured from the
side of the ROPE’S retaining feature (per I04-E) that abuts the DAVIT fingers (L), to
the farthest point on the ROPE from this feature.
C. be designed/configured to not exceed a length of 8 ft. (~244 cm) measured from the
side of the ROPE’S retaining feature (per I04-E) that abuts the DAVIT fingers (L), to
the farthest point on the ROPE from this feature.
F. if knotted, the top knot must be at least 29 in. (~74 cm) below the retaining
knot/feature (K)
I think that this answers the question. The bottom of the touchpad is 4’10", and point F. requires knots to be below the Touchpad. If you want a rope that touches the ground at its longest point, then you would need 29" + 4’10" or 7’3" (87"). This also means that the rope can extend no more than 9" across the floor. It also must be within 24" of the ground. I hope this answers OP’s question. This rule is kind of a pain, but it makes sense after the fifth read through.
By my measurements of the field, 18 in of rope are required to get from the davit fingers to the bottom of the davit, which is 58 in above the ground, which gives a length of 76 in.
This is probably too true. Our rope “touches” the ground. However, it still takes a few seconds to stop swaying. We also instruct our pilot to attempt to drop the rope on opponents, which doesn’t help the swaying. I normally drive until the rope is in our hopper to stop swaying, then back out and allow it onto the climber. Velcro climbers are a little different, since they require the rope to be knot free to spool up properly. We would add weight if we could, but I like the Velcro method. It grabs well and is quick.
Pretty sure there is a rule against strategies aimed at fouling opponents. Be careful with that one.
We switched ropes twice during Waterford, so I believe we inspected ~12 ropes on Friday, ~6 ropes on Saturday.
We warned the inspectors ahead of time that we would be inspecting a lot of ropes, and had a similar experience to you.
There is often a significant amount of down-time for inspectors so it wasn’t really a problem because we only needed to a few inspected ASAP, then we finished getting the rest inspected as the competition went on.
We inspected 7 or 8. Only did 1 during our actual “inspection time” and then the rest later in the day on Thursday when I got to the venue.
Our team had 4 ropes inspected. one of the ropes was actually used by another team. Our team and the borrowing team went to the inspectors station and all that needed to be done was to transfer our tag number to the other teams list.
Hmm. Now I think I know why 2056 asked their recent Q&A questions. Tricky Tricky.
We had a slip knot in our original rope design but we took it out when we determined it wasn’t needed and just added time to our climb.
I see most pilots unstrapping the rope and dropping it from that point, which maximizes the sway. If you’re having trouble with that, you should have your pilot take the extra second to grab the rope and step over to the davit before dropping it, so it falls straight down. This is completely legal – you can do anything you want with the rope as long as none of it is below the airship deck.
Also, there’s no rule against unfastening the rope early, as long as you don’t drop it until the 30 second endgame. You could even unstrap it at the beginning of the match and try to play jump-rope with it, though that might be considered a safety violation…