I was looking at the countdowns today and noticed the kickoff is quickly approaching and will be here before i know it. Since the kickoff is broadcast worldwide within milliseconds of dean telling us about the object of the game, is it true that the west coasters will have 4 hours more time to build than the east coast?
Indeed, given the nature of the FIRST ship deadline, the west coast traditionally gets a few more hours of build time than the east coast.
As Dean has said, FIRST isn’t fair. 
Actually the time difference is only three hours… (GMT-5 to GMT-8)
On the other hand, they will practically have three less hours to submit their WFA or Chairman’s Award, given the due date for those are Feb 23th, 11:59PM EST (8:59PM PST), and that west coasters on average wake up 3 hours after east coasters do.
hahahhahahah
Those poor suckers on the West coast get three hours LESS sleep than we do afterward. Anyone else glad to see that crate go every year, regardless of what’s in it?
To avoid even the appearance of west-coast-bias, as well as the real potential for west coast teams to avoid having a four-hour advantage during the entire build season, FIRST has undertaken certain measures to compensate for the differences in game-release-vs-ship-deadline schedules. FIRST has worked with InnovationFIRST to add some special code into the default software that every team will be required to use. The code includes a special “geographic detection and compensation” (GDC) algorithm that will determine the time zone of the team, and the difference between the team time zone and MST (Manchester Standard Time). At apparently random times during the last week of the build season, the IFI controller will automatically shut down and disable itself for 30-minute periods. These periods will actually be carefully selected to be at the most inconvenient and frustrating moments, such as during a critical testing period or operator training. These random blackout periods will continue until the total disabled time equals the time difference caused by the team location. Once the GDC algorithm has determined that the team no longer has any possibility of preferential timing due to their location, the code shuts down and automatically removes itself from the system.
Note that due to one minor bug in the software that has not yet been resolved, locations of teams in the southern hemisphere are not properly identified. Due to an unfortunate sign-inversion error that has not been tracked down, the software calculates that these teams actually ship their robots before the kick-off. To compensate for this, the GDC software actually generates a small singularity, and the associated team is sucked through the resulting black hole back in time a number of hours equivalent to the time zone differences. IFI is trying to fix this before the kick-off, but there are no guarantees…
-dave
ACK! He brings the confusion and headaches again…
Woot! more time!
I just wanted to say this before anyone else did: Dave is giving us a hint about next year! 
One that we all fear might actually be true…
Normally I don’t have to open the bottle of Advil until the six weeks! :ahh:
So the ultimate answer would be to attend a remote kick-off in England and then head back to the US and ship your robot from California. Doesn’t really matter where you build it!
Dang it! hey i wonder if we can capitalize on the singularity affect and use it to power the robots. Actually the nice thing about being an east coaster is that… well… we have Lavery? Well actually their is proximity to kickoff. 
I knew this looked familiar…
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26112&highlight=west+coast+extra
Hope every one has brushed up on special relativity, the matches will be so short that your robot will have to move fast enough to dialate time and accomplish the task.
In the real world are you going to go complain to your boss about something this small? Life just isn’t fair, if your tools break during build season you dint get any more time then teams with working tools do. So you just gotta learn how to play with the hand your dealt. If you think 3-4 hours really matter that much look at tit in a positive way, the teams who have less time are just that much better for doing it in less time.
Also what about the Israeli team, do that have to ship earlier or later then east coast teams?
Hope every one has brushed up on special relativity, the matches will be so short that your robot will have to move fast enough to dialate time and accomplish the task.
I know I have.
what if you make a ship to travel as close to the speed of like as you can get so you can build forever. Or if you travel AT the speed of light you will never have to ship but you robot will be infinitely small. But if you never have to ship why are you building a robot. This kinda reminds me of the grandfather paradox.
According to the equation E=MC^2 your robot would also go wayy over weight in this scenario. So you have positives and negatives everywhere.
The great thing about being a north-easterner is being able attend the Manchester Kickoff every year without going through a major hassle. Well, except for the snow every year. :rolleyes:
But more realistically, during the build season you have about 1,085 hours to build your robot. Does three hours really make that much of a difference?
You can overcome those three hours by working on your robot an extra 4 minutes per day during the build season.
Hmm, I will have to consider extending our meetings until 8:04. 
Unless anyone is planning on working 24/7 for 6 weeks, the extra three hours are utterly worthless.
This is the wrong fact to focus on. The true fact of focus should be the size of a team. If one team has 12 members, and another team has 36 members, over 6 weeks, the first team has 2/3 less labor hours than the second. Three hours at kickoff doesn’t make a difference!!! It’s all those extra work-hours that large teams have just due to their size that is the real problem. You should demand that FIRST reduce the size of the teams.
Once we get the time issue under control, we can go for weaning the organization off these big business and government hand-outs. That way, all teams have identical financial portfolios as well.
HEH you would think that wouldn’t you. Actually size has absolutely nothing to do with your work ability. It’s all about organization and resources. Our team has 79 kids. Thats right 79 kids (and about 10 mentors not to mention we require all the parents of the kids to participate) last I checked. Theoretically we should be able to build a horde of robots. OK now picture 79 kids and most of them want to build drive trains, not happening. You start having to assign people jobs and leadership becomes uber important because if kids have nothing to do they sit around and talk, this has a magnet effect on surrounding kids. Also consider that all we have access to is a wood shop. Its very hard to do work and this year we’ve been forced to take a modular approach to the robot where each group builds one thing and has four weeks then at the end we combine our projects into a single robot. We’ve found our size makes us unwieldy and it’s much easier to manage smaller groups. My point is that yes a large team can do everything they want and do it well… provided that they are very organized and have access to the tools. The one nice thing we’ve found about being big is that if you require kids to fundraise a certain amount of money, $100 say, you can virtually pay for a good section of the robot… assuming you can get the majority of the kids to fundraise. :rolleyes:
“It’s all about the math”–Mark Leon
You guys are all saying that it’s three hours difference, but you need to do the math. West Coast teams have their build start three hours earlier than East coast teams. However, West Coast teams ship three hours later than East Coast teams. So, the West Coast has six hours more build time than the East Coast. But I don’t see anyone complaining about the Midwest (two extra hours) or mountains (four extra hours). AK and HI have more time (in theory) than anyone else, and Israel and the UK have less (also in theory).
Moving on…
When you look at the big picture, who always has better robots? Mostly the Midwest and East. So the West Coast teams have the extra time, but they may not make the best use of it, while most of you guys in the Midwest make good use of your time. IT’S NOT ABOUT HOW MUCH TIME YOU HAVE, BUT HOW YOU USE IT.
[quote=mechanicalbrain]HEH you would think that wouldn’t you. Actually size has absolutely nothing to do with your work ability. It’s all about organization and resources. Our team has 79 kids. Thats right 79 kids (and about 10 mentors not to mention we require all the parents of the kids to participate) last I checked.