I don’t at all understand what you mean.
Teams need to take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and make a realistic assessment of what they are capable of.
First had never texted actual robots on the pyramid, and when a team built the pyramid and put a old robot at around 150 pounds on it, the slide in joints at the corners started to flex and actually twist the pyramid, not so it broke but twisted in the extra space in all of the joints. I just feel like until the release something after week 1 that will strengthen the pyramid, I don wants to risk putting my robot that high in the air.
Are you talking about the team pyramid our the actual pyramid? I think the actual pyramids is one of, if not the strongest FIELD elements ever designed by FIRST
Right. I’m pretty comfortable hanging near-arbitrary FRC-scale weights off of welded 1.5" steel.
Eh, there’s a way to look at it which assumes equal teleop scoring between the alliances. Do you think it’s just a coincidence that a perfect autonomous (15-discs) is worth just as much as a perfect triple-30 climb? It’s also not a coincidence that both are [mostly] undeniable points – that is, there’s very little that can be done defensively to deny an opponent those points. IMO, they’re both equally difficult too.
Are there potentially 3 teams in the entire world who could band together to pull off 180 undeniable points? Probably – but the selections process probably won’t let that happen. I think the common elite alliance will be able to pull off roughly 120+ undeniable points at the more competitive events, depending on the tradeoffs the engineers had to make for hybrid vs specialized machines. After that it comes down to strategy and raw disc scoring ability.
With that said, specializing and doing nothing else needs to be done on a team-by-team basis. It’s probably the best option for most teams (bottom 4 sigmas of a Gaussian distribution), but alas, most of those “most teams” won’t do it either. You never know, specializing could also fill the niche that 2 ‘powerhouse’ robots need in order to get to 120+.
So which are we more likely to see first: Three teams hanging from the top or a pyramid collapse into a heap of scrap from all the weight?
I agree with the specialization approach. And I also think that when we are evaluating what tasks most teams would be successful at specializing in, the order of tasks ends up prioritized like this:
3 pt shooting
10 pt hang
5 pt shooting
Floor pickup and shooting in autonomous
20 pt hang
30 pt hang
So the 30 pt hang should be at the bottom of the list…but maybe I just say that because I haven’t figured out a way for our team to do it, after two weeks of thinking about it.
Please cite your source for this. They may not have tested robots built by teams, but I would be amazed if they did not build their own robots to test the game and ensure the pyramid was strong enough.
There are many reasons not to hang, but I do not think fear of the pyramid breaking should be one of them.
You didn’t build the actual pyramid, you built the team pyramid. The actual pyramid is welded together and doesn’t have wood and U-bolts holding it together.
Definitely the former. No way something built like that collapses.
I’d be willing to bet that they hung more than three competition weights on it. A steel wielded structure with the specific purpose of hanging robots on it has probably been designed, redesigned, and overdesigned.
It was not from an online source, it was a FIRST FTA.
The pipe is not the problem, the steel pipe can hold plenty of weight. The joints where the couplings slide into each other, that is the weak point.
But looking back it wouldn’t be the first time they had to redesign game after launch, logo motion for example, the pegs for hanging tubes had to be fixed
Ok I think we are getting off topic
I think if you have three robots that just get to the 10pt thats 30pt not including shooting and auto :yikes:
This is the way our team saw it.
Last year, we were pretty lacking on strategy and baiscally went right into design.
Are we shooting? Yes. Are we cooperating? Yes. 3 pt hoop? Yes. Play defense? Yes. Play offence? Yes.
Anyway, we took the more specialized approach this year. We didnt have much success as a shooter in 2012. Yes, we could shoot the threes and twos, but not on a level that made us competitive. Shooting is a variable thing. Lots of things change while you’re shooting. Your surrounding change. Your position will change (Even if we think we’re at the same spot, its easy to be off). The discs themselves will change. To what extent is unknown, but game pieces will change match to match.
What wont change? The pyramid. Our robot. There’s a lot less variables in climbing.
From another angle, how may actions of shooting does it take to get 30 points? Well, you have to get discs, grab them, shoot them, and do that at least 10 times.
Climbing the pyramid is a repeatable, reliable, one time action. It works or it doesn’t. We go to the pyramid and do our climbing. Not having to worry about all these factors (some of them we may not even fully understand) made us go for the pyramid.
I like your thought process (it’s how we did it too, to an extent) and think you have a great strategy. Yet consider that 5 scored autonomous discs are just as repeatable, reliable and quick as pyramid climbing. The only variable is disc warping, but we have a design that accounts for that. Food for thought next year (the GDC has become very good at designing tradeoffs into their games).
We saw this as well, but our lack of success with shooting projectiles last year made us wary of going off and trying to score the big points with that again.
PS Im intrigued on this “accounting for warp” you sneaked in there.
On the pyramid climb: The top zone of the pyramid gets pretty space restrictive, making it seemingly difficult for multiple inside climbers. Three 20 point inside climbers will be tight.