Yes. The only difference regarding the Doubler and *Negation Barrels *are the specific time and location restrictions mentioned in the rule.
No. Any team touching an opposing Robot which is contacting an A*lliance Starting Tile *will be considered in a legal loading position as per <SG7>. Teams cannot use their *Robot *to completely prevent accessibility to the Alliance Starting Tile.
Just to clarify: It is legal for a robot to prevent an opposing robot from gaining access to their Alliance Starting Tile. What I was referring to in the previous post was a team who uses their robot to cover the entire Alliance Starting Tile in an effort to eliminate any legal Match Loads. In situation where a team attempts this type of maneuver, simply touching the robot who is covering the majority of the Alliance Starting Tile will suffice to be considered in a legal loading position as per <SG7>.
Simply put: blocking a team from getting to their starting tile is fine. Trying to cover the entire tile will lead to a relaxation of <SG7> for the alliance that has its tile covered.
Here’s the best guidance we have. Cutting off a path to get to an Alliance Starting Tile is fine. Occupying the Alliance Starting Tile (Being on and covering more approximately half the tile) will invoke the relaxation of <SG7>.
No, only in the case where more than half the Alliance Starting Tile is being covered. The intent of this relaxation is to allow teams to still Match Load despite their tile being covered. The intent is not to extend the area that a team has to Match Load while an opponent just happens to be touching part of an Alliance Starting Tile.
Assume we measure a “covering” by the area of the smallest circumscribing square,
(as opposed to just the 4 sq inches covered by the tires touching)
a 17.5 x 17.5 " square robot covers ~306 sq inches.
which is more than half of a 24x24=576 sq inch starting square.
I’m parsing the practical part of guidance to be that parking a large robot wholly on the starting square is > 50%, while keeping at least half your robot off the starting square is easily < 50%. In between can go either way.
Does that sound about right?
While its always risky to have judges review of the replay tape some days after…
An interested party points out this example link:
Around 6:26, bottom left of the field around the red side of the field,
Red is being kept off of its starting square by blue, while blue is +/- 50% on the square at different times. It looks like Red gets the negator barrel anyway, possibly through SG7 relaxation, as it is being pushed away.
It looks like a hard-fought battle over the red square, which is really not much differnt than the following hard-fought battle over scoring the negator barrel.
Any comments about “good gameplay” vs “too defensive” or “too aggressive”?
At the time the matchloader starts movement to load, redrobot may be touching the red square, but redrobot is definitely not touching the red square by the time the negator barrel touches the robot. Any comments about that?
Thanks for your time.
The situation shown in the video looks like “good gameplay”, in terms of the back and forth pushing.
From what I can see in this video, it looks like the Negation Barrel was loading into the robot while it was not touching the Alliance Starting Tile. Also, the opposing robot seemed to not be covering more than half of the Alliance Starting Tile. As such, it appears that this was a violation of SG7 as clarified on the 13th of December.
