During Elims, A ball got stuck between the two ball return pipes and the wire… the balls that were returned later got stuck on the bottom
OK, just exactly how did that ball get jammed there? 
:eek:
Some robot (was it 888?) kicked it. There’s another picture elsewhere showing the path it took.
The ball was kicked from the middle zone, hit the bump, and rocketed in between the pipes, where it stuck.
At least that’s my “magic ball theory”. 
The wildest shot I witnessed was from our own robot.
We were playing defense in the apposing alliance’s home zone. We grabbed a ball and attempted to kick it out of the zone. It must have been one of the more firmly inflated balls that day. It shot out of our bot as hard as I’ve ever seen it kick, bounced off one of the vertical poles on the tower and back into the opposing alliance’s home zone. Then it proceeded to ricochet off the side wall and directly into the goal. We scored against our selves and the ball never touched the floor after we kicked it!
Wow! You should have bought a lottery ticket that day 
Here is a good video of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un5F088PTyE#t=2m7s
this is kind of embarrassing… i was on that side of the field for field reset and i didn’t even know that thats the way it happened… what are the chances that when 888 kicked that ball, it would get stuck like that
wow I’m still having a hard time believing that happened and you have visual proof!
what caused the balls to “hiccup” at the end and get stuck there? did the lodged ball kick the rails out of place?
From what I’ve heard, it seems as though it either pushed the rails apart and slowed the balls down too much or it just acted as a bump itself
It’s pretty hilarious though
The stuck ball acted like a speed bump for returning balls. They went right over it, but were slowed down. The first ball over the stuck ball was slowed down just enough to not skip over the horizontal tower rail at the exit (I never did understand why the return track was positioned low enough to hit this horizontal rail, rather than just being high enough to go over it. That was just asking for trouble.) so it lodged there. The following balls did not have nearly enough speed to knock the first one loose, so they accumulated. There may have been some slight effect from the stuck ball pulling the rails down and changing their slope, but it was primarily the speed bump effect.
Ah makes more sense now. but the ball flying into the rail is so surreal, imagine where the ball would fly if the rail wasn’t there!
imagine where the ball would fly if the rail wasn’t there!
something like this would happen?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnE0j69_gYk
Can i just give some credit to the Curie field staff? It did seem to take a little time to figure out what was going, but their very quick reaction of throwing some more balls into the middle zone was very smoothly and quickly put together.
I know that the match was replayed, but kudos needs to be given to the field crew and Head Referee for making a tough call to try and even things out.Hmmmm… Now this could be an effective way to stop 469
I would imagine that the ball acting as a speed bump would change the speed of the exiting ball enough that it might not work with 469’s redirecting.
I’m sure this is what 888 was going for 
It was a fairly strange thing to see from in the stands!
Very odd for this to happened! :eek:
I remember seeing this happen. When i was behind the driver station, I looked up to see a ball jammed in the return rack. I looked at the sight in awe, and tried to ignore it. Hehehe. That was a great match none-the-less.
HAHA, that would have been epic in Curie match 100 if right when most of the balls were in cycle one got stuck causing them all to stop at the bottom.
After watching the video it seems as though if the trident player had sent the balls down faster they could have made it over the ball and onto the field. He banged the ball return a few times, but he still let the balls gently roll down the return instead of pushing them down with speed which may have allowed them to get onto the field.
In one of our practice matches on Thursday morning, a ball our robot kicked ended up hanging in the chains in the goal until the end of the match. I’ll see if we have pictures of that…
Noel