Can a team choose to just stay in the opposing teams secret passage and block any balls from getting to that teams rpbots?
Possession of >1 isn’t going to end well. And you can’t score from there.
If you get touched by an opposing robot in the opposing secret passage, you get a foul
Not necessarily. Are they contacting you, or are you contacting them?
As a different example: you and I are standing next to each other. One of us slaps the other on the back. Who did the contacting?
Isn’t that against g11 though
Under debate elsewhere.
This depends on your definition of contact. There are two or three discussions on this currently happening over CD.
G21 A ROBOT contacting carpet in the opponent’s SECRET PASSAGE may not contact opposing ROBOTS.
Violation: TECH FOUL
There is nothing in this that states who must initiate the contact for it to be a foul.
For future reference, Eric is referring to this thread
Penalties aside, this still isn’t a chokehold because your opponent can still score points for crossing, breaching, challenging and scaling. Plus all the boulders that start on the field. A chokehold is a strategy that guarantees success if you achieve it. If the opponent can’t prevent you from doing X, then nothing else they do will matter because you’ll win. And it really meant to refer to a single technical challenge.
Technically, a chokehold strategy would be, say, preventing them from accessing any boulders while breaching their defense and capturing their tower. But at that point your fool proof strategy is to win a match, which isn’t informative.
The last real chokehold I recall was 2002. Keep all the goals off your side of the field and get atleast one on your opponent’s side, and you won. That was a single technical feat achievable (just) by a single robot.
If you physically block the balls from getting out on the field and have the balls stay on the driver side of the station you could backup the ball holding and force more then the cap of 5 or 6 balls or whatever in the station. This would fall under a strategy forced at making the other team receive fouls. At the same if you were parked against the wall and the human player put two balls into play you would be trapping them against the wall, this is a definition of controlling and you are only allowed to control one boulder at a time.
Pick your poison.
You can’t block balls from being introduced. That would be a G11 violation because of G34.
You can sit midway down the Secret Passage, and block balls from going all the way down. However, if the other team comes along, you better get out of the way.
I don’t have the manual on me but there’s a rule that says if you try to give another team a penalty by your action, you get the foul and they don’t get punished.
G11: Strategies aimed solely at forcing the opposing ALLIANCE to violate a rule are not in the spirit of FIRST Robotics Competition and not allowed. Rule violations forced in this manner will not result in an assignment of a penalty to the targeted ALLIANCE.
Violation: FOUL. If egregious or repeated, YELLOW CARD
No, because they can still introduce balls through the Brattice. If those balls bounce off your robot, it’s still legal as per a combo of the G38 blue box and G39 blue box. You can herd or trap balls while in the opponent’s secret passage, and G38 says that if it just deflects off your robot it’s not even considered possession.
In Quals this is only decent, as you may not have a shooter on your alliance, so the balls just deflect away from the opponent. But in Elims a shooter with intake could stand next to the chokehold robot and intake + shoot all of the balls deflected. They are also braced by at least 1 wall, so moving them would be extremely difficult.
This is a definite question for Q&A, as it would completely break play like 469 in 2010. The precedent for this is that 469 never technically controlled the ball in 2010. I figure if something as gregarious as that was let go, this would be allowed as well. In fact the robot would end up quite similar, thinking about it.
Making a robot like this would take a piece of polycarb and 30 minutes at competition, so I’m not too worried about doing it right now.
Take a gander at G20, it basically says you can only enter/exit the opponent’s Secret Passage in order to get to/from their courtyard, so while I suppose it’s technically legal as long as you exit into the courtyard (assuming you’re coming from the neutral zone), but after long enough of sitting there, the refs would probably call you on that
Actually, I think you need to re-read that one.
You cannot repeat cannot enter or exit your opponents’ Secret Passage from the Neutral Zone. You MUST enter AND exit it (should you chose to do so) from the Courtyard–unless you like getting Fouls and Tech Fouls. And while you are there you cannot contact their robot per G21 (whether or not they can initiate contact and get you penalized is up for debate).
IF the refs believe that your intent is solely to draw a foul they will call a G11. My experience as drive team coach has been that the referees are far more likely to call the foul on the team that was trying to play defense. I would think of the secret passage as more of a safe zone for the other team. If your strategy is to play defense by blocking balls and a robot contacts you while trying to get any of those balls it will be called on you. Of course it’s up to the referee on how they see it, but if you could the number of G21’s this year I bet it’s quite a bit higher than G11’s.