I am wondering what the main scoring idea is this year (2010). What is yours?
We’re not 100% percent sure yet, but we’re pretty sure it’s going to involve moving the balls into the goals. 
But seriously, i don’t think hanging is really worth it. A well designed robot should be able to score twice during that time. Especially if opponents are preoccupied with hanging.
But the real question is whether your team could score 8 times in those twenty seconds.
We’ve got some pretty beast prototypes for a launcher mechanism. Post pictures asap.
We thought that too. But DOGMA says that when the match has 15 second left, balls don’t need to be returned. It’s an interesting problem though.
But I kind of agree, if you can create a super effective scoring method and spend your time & weight on it as oppose to a hanging system I think you’d be in good shape.
…assuming you have balls to score with…
Yeah, which is why we play the middle.
A better way to think of this is not what the max a TEAM can score in the 20 seconds, but only what you can do. So as long as you can score 2 or 3 balls in that time instead of hanging you have countered any point you would have recieved from hanging. Your 2 partners could still hang for 4 or 5 points, plus you put in 2 or 3 ball then your team still scored the same amount of points in the 20 seconds that the other team did without you hanging. Plus as others have mentioned, if you can go over the bumps, we feel that we can score the 2 balls in 20 seconds without hanging. With 12 balls on the field, there will be some balls left at the end to kick in.
Not quite correct.
DOGMA states that any ball the enters the goal with less than 11 seconds left will not have to be returned to play before the game clock hits 0. There is nothing that states that the balls don’t need to be returned (as this could rack up penalty points for a hanger that interferes with the ball return) nor does anything state that the game clock does not continue into the negatives.
We’ll have to wait for a GDC interpretation on that when it’s asked in the FIRST forums
That is interesting…
I didn’t know that you don’t have to return balls in the last 11 seconds. It brings up the point that if you can, and still have weight that you can spend, then you might as well try to hang if you have enough people to design a hanging mechanism that will still fit on the bot.
our main strategy is to stay in the middle and play defense… get all of the balls from the opposing alliances ball return and get them to our side