Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the first FRC shooting game ever where you launch game pieces at and over your own alliance station?
The closest shooting dynamic I could think of was launching fuel at your boiler in a near corner in 2017 (and we know few of us actually did that - AndyMark REALLY knows). But I believe this is the first where scored game pieces are crossing the alliance wall, through the speaker directly(ish) over your drive team’s head.
I know most of us plan to have automatic aiming means or at least a robot-mounted camera view to assist with aiming, but lacking those, I wonder what under-resourced teams without such functionality or teams whose vision/cams temporarily go out to lunch might do to manually align themselves…other than pursuing the subwoofer alignment, that is. I can see some natural field landmarks to key upon, but I’m wondering what others have discussed on this topic.
Even with magic aiming techno-wizardry, it just seems more awkward chucking game pieces in your own direction relative to traditional means, simply because ye can’t use your eyeballs to DIRECTLY observe shots and manually correct as necessary. If drivers weren’t used to looking at that camera feed programmers give them, guess they’ll have to get used to it this year.
The Speaker is tall… Like until you build one you can’t imagine it. The top down view in the game animation makes it seem much smaller. There will be shots wide on either side and above the driver’s heads.
We actually can’t move it from one side of the room to the other because of the drop ceiling. We will have to lay it on its side on a cart to do so.
Even auto alignment can miss if someone hits you while playing defense. There is no defense protection near the speaker or subwoofer really
I was a coach in 2014 and I honestly didn’t even question it really. Without going back and looking at who was on each side I’d believe it.
Edit: I think it was Sherlock Holmes who essentially didn’t want to fill his brain with trivial information so he was kind of rude and would just stop listening to useless info? I have something like that but with a time window. I can only really remember the specifics of a game for like maybe a two year window. After that who knows
Hear me out… Does 2015 count? You were always scoring on your own half of the field closest to the driver station. Would’ve been fun to be forced to be on opposite ends though. Might’ve made the game more of a challenge. However you were not shooting totes above the drive station wall… Hopefully…
I suppose it could, but they didn’t go “over” the wall, so it wouldn’t meet the original post criteria. I think most robots scored on those goals up close anyway.
But for those who could score from further away, aligning for those shots definitely could have felt weirder.
Let Dean’s face be your guide. You scored toward your own wall in 2010.
PS I try to forget about this game (and more specifically our robot, which was happily stripped down to the frame and is now a t-shirt cannon robot) as much as humanly possible.
Is the spacebar E-Stop on the driver station PC disabled when connected to the FMS?
All this talk of missed speaker shots and where they might fly over the wall, and I’ve never actually thought about that as a potential (ridiculous) failure mode.
I wonder if we will see netting added around the drive station walls on either side of the speaker. The steamworks goals had something to that effect if I’m remembering correctly.
Like a foul ball net in baseball. This would mean the difference between human players and volunteers having to reset more or less pieces as well as they could rebound right back to the field if a net/cage was added.
