I haven’t seen any discussion about this move on here yet, so I thought I’d bring it up. At ISR4 there were a few cases where we found ourselves with a cargo, next to a rocket with one hatch covered with a panel and the other uncovered. Rather than drop the cargo to go grab a hatch, we lined up with the open hatch and rolled the cargo in, over the bump, and into the opposite bay.
There’s a great view of this from the stream here on the near blue rocket. We did it again here and here on the far red rocket, but it’s a bit harder to see.
As long as you can shoot out the cargo with a bit of force, it usually rolls over the bump fairly smoothly. It’s not ideal, but it’s certainly better than trying to score the cargo normally where there’s a 50% chance it rolls out and you lose a cycle.
Seems like a good move to me. If you can guarantee the ball going over the bump and getting to the other side, it saves a lot of time. As long as you haven’t been called out for it yet, I think it’s a viable strategy.
I’ve seen a few other teams do this in our district as well.
We thought about this move during the season but never really considered trying it in a competition, due to the uncertainty that our intake was powerful enough to roll the cargo over the bump.
I think this is a great move to pull off in the scenarios you mentioned but in other cases, it’s pretty inefficient and also a bit risky.
During our design discussion early in the season we had actually theorized that some teams may have a manipulator that would direct cargo to one side or the other in the rocket, either be putting some english on the ball, or having a “poker” that would stick into the rocket to force a ball to one side or the other.
Haven’t seen either of those concepts in competition (yet).