62 Qualification Outrage

blatwell · March 6, 2018, 6:50am

kypyro:

I appreciate your clarifications. I’m re-reading the posts here and comparing it to the Q&A clarifications as well as looking at some tournament video.

Concerning the point above, is it common in Indiana for the mobile goal movers to be designed so that the don’t pinch the goal? We’ve had some scrimmages with Indiana teams, and it sure looked to me as though the mobile goal movers were “pinching” and otherwise holding the mobile goals. Certainly, in a brief view of a moving robot from across the field it would look that way. Given how flexible the VEX components are, how do you ensure you can’t pinch the goal so you can legally push it around, but guarantee you can pick it up when you need to?

I remember that for certain defensive strategies you’ve said your teams clear their use with the head referees beforehand. Is this the sort of thing you were talking about? Would you advise one of your teams who wanted to use this tactic to demonstrate to the head ref that it is impossible for their goal mover to pinch the mobile goal, and therefore as long as you don’t press the “lift goal” button, you couldn’t be in violation?

As I’ve said, I’ve never seen this in competition. But we’re about to have our KY HS State tournament, and then we have some teams going to US Open. We have one team qualified for Worlds via an online challenge, and one whose skills score should hold up too, (and my daughter’s MS team was tournament champ) so we’re going to take some teams to Worlds. Planning for what we’ll face.

I guess I should clarify a couple of things. This is not a strategy we have seen widely used in Indiana but it has been done. We have one team that has an interchangeable subsystem 3 and one of them is a cage. If they are going to go defensive, they use the cage. Even with all the Q&A on cages, the calls still go the wrong way on occasion. They plan on bringing a printout of all Q&A that ally to cages to our state tournament as well as info on another surprise defensive strategy we have not seen used this year. They do plan on discussing it with the ref prior to using it.

As far as pinching goes, very few actually pinch the mobile goal but they do grasp it. Here is a Q&A that explains what they define as grasping fairly well. Most intakes in Indiana do not actually have actuating arms that move in to attach to the mobile goal.