Quick question on behalf of one of my teams. Would a 4 motor V5 drive with 600rpm internal gear cartridges externally geared to drive the wheels at 300rpm and a 4 motor V5 drive with 200rpm internal gear cartridges externally geared to drive the wheels at 300rpms have the same torque, stall at the same time, and function effectively the same? If not, how would they function differently?
I don’t think that it would make a difference other than if one has more drag or friction than the other
Everything would be the same assuming the same friction on each setup. The only thing that could be different would be the amount of play in the gear system from the motor to the wheel.
To add to what @Gameoa said, that play in the gear system will generally be lower with bigger gears because there is less angle from tooth to tooth. That means a method using larger gears will tend to provide more precision in the motions, not faster nor stronger, just more precision.
Our middle school team had a 4 motor 600 rpm drive for the past couple of tournaments. The amount of drag it had was a lot more than ours, which was a 4 motor 200 rpm drive. I think no matter what they are both going to be fragile, and will be limited on torque. I think experimenting between the two would be interesting to see, I can agree though that I feel that the gears would probably provide more precision, but no matter what there will be very little torque, which means there will be no productive defense, and potential burnouts (however with how V5 is, I don’t know if I can see a burnout).
Regarding this subject, with the ideal case both have the same performance.
However, I still believe it’s smarter to have a 600 RPM Gearbox with an external torque gearbox in practice as VEX’s gearbox build quality is definitely better than anything we can build externally using gears. Better to have more friction going against a torque ratio than more friction going against a speed ratio.
In reality, there shouldn’t be a noticable difference assuming same build quality.