Here’s a clip from a game I saw on TBA:
I’d like to know if this is a valuable strat.
thx 
How many preloads did 254 have? Or did some slip in from the dumped hopper?
An improvement to this strategy would be to place the divider in front of the opponent’s feeder station.
Did that result in a field fault? If so, it could be exploited.
What occurred and at what time? I must be missing something here.
Smashing the divider off the field Velcro and moving it to roughly in front of the head ref panel. Not really sure why OP is wondering about the validity of doing this intentionally.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Nope.
Longest answer: Nope.avi
That would be a G15 violation. Repeated would result in a Yellow Card.
Chiming in from 5026 here (though I wasn’t at SF, but this came up in Slack),
This was completely unintentional, our drivetrain is pretty strong and our driver is agressive and he just plowed through it without being able to see what was going on.
I don’t believe we were carded for it (nor was it a field fault), and to be completely honest I think no one realized it had happened until reviewing match footage on Monday after the event.
Something similar happened at an event and a field fault was called causing a re-match.
This particular panel was falling off on a regular basis. If I remember correctly, team 4159 was initially given a yellow card for it in a qualification match, but then that was taken away after the referee team realized that it was falling off too easily. Our driver had no intention to break it, just trying to play some defense on 254 and he was a bit aggressive. The only people who even noticed it, to the best of my knowledge were the human players on our alliance.
I caution anyone to be extremely careful using this “strategy” in eliminations and risk major penalties/cards.
TL;DR: We weren’t doing this on purpose, but there was no foul for it.
Happened in Semis 2 at CIR. A red side robot disconnected their divider and the match was stopped very quickly. Happened (IIRC) with a good chunk of the match remaining.
Kind of annoyed us as we were ahead, but it probably would have affected the outcome.
We got some fuel jammed in our climber and our driver knocked one of those off trying to kick the ball out during a semis(?) match. They just aren’t secured to the floor that well.
But, as has already been stated, no. You cannot knock parts of the field off intentionally.
I haven’t seen it but heard chatter that there was a robot very prone to tiping over. The idea was to tip over in the loading zone of the oppositions then estop the driverstation to avoid penalties.
Opps
That is a very good way to get red carded by the head ref and blackballed by the rest of the teams at the event.
The Q&A has been very clear. This will not prevent penalties. It’s a tech foul for every touch. It’s even a tech foul for every touch if, 10 seconds after tipping over, the opponents push you into the zone.
Similar events happened at Q58 at Westtown. 1640 hit 1712 into the divider, causing it to dislodge and block the center rope of the airship (preventing 365 from hanging). The match was replayed.
That might work in FTC, where disabled robots are immune to penalties. However, in FRC, disabled robots still receive penalties. Getting disabled in the loading zone (or near enough to be pushed in as a byproduct of going for normal game objectives) is a gift of 50-100 or more easy points to your opponents. (They can certainly arrange to bump the disabled robot at least once on each trip to pick up gears. Bumping just for the sake of penalty points is a C08 violation, but bumping on the way to the gear slot is completely legitimate.)
And yet they said this at the beginning of the season.