Anyone that has seen an actual field: is the surface of the tower smooth enough that a suction cup would hold well to it?
It’s completely smooth, but I don’t think I would count on it being weight bearing. It’s pretty thin polycarbonate that is held on to the frame behind it with some brackets that are a loose fit on the frame according to the drawings. I would expect it to have quite a bit of wiggle and flex and certainly wouldn’t try to hang the weight of a robot off of it.
We would actually be pushing in against the wall with our design some where in the range of 50-70 lbs
The rules specifically say that some elements of the tower are not load bearing. If you had a five pound contact force to keep alignment, that would probably be OK, but 50-70 pounds is likely to be a problem.
See particularly G12 (esp G12.c) and the blue box under scaling in section 3.1.