https://vexforum.com/t/answered-additional-clarification-of-sg9/22348/1
The ruling in the previous thread stated that a Robot intentionally supporting part of its weight on the trough is at a risk of damaging the field and could be called for violating <SG9>.
We would like to further inquire about this ruling with a situation we have been placed in during practice against the resident hoarder at our club. This hasn’t happened at a competition against us, so we have never had a referee give a ruling on the situation.
The situation is depicted below
[ATTACH]7213[/ATTACH]
On the left side of the dashed line is our shovel being used to cover a goal but we intentionally never make contact with the trough because then we would be deemed illegal for hanging on the troughs. The right side of the dashed line depicts the situation explained next. At the end of one match at our field, a hoarder style robot from our club legally empties their object holding mechanism placing the objects into scoring position in the troughs which happens to be on top of our shovel. This weight of over ten objects causes the tip of our polycarbonate to bend and make contact with the trough. All the wheels still maintained contact on the floor because only the polycarbonate bent. Would this be illegal because the our robot could be deemed a potential to damage the field while maintaining the position depicted in the picture, or deemed unintentionally being a potential damage to the field because we did everything in our power to prevent us from initially touching any part of the trough but were then forced to by the weight of the objects and the limits of the polycarbonate plate’s strength.