This is not my strategy, but if a team were to expand in a vector, and in doing this technically expand vertically, while outside of the expansion zone, would they be penalized, or is this too minor of a violation
As long as you stay within the 36" expansion limit, you’ll be fine.
If you change the score what-so-ever when breaking the height limit when not touching the expansion zone, regardless if match affecting or not, you get disqualified.
This rule slightly concerns me with the platforms and the horizontal but not vertical expansion limit if you push a robot off the platform causing the robot you push to tip. Yes tipping other robots is legal as long as it’s unintentional, but if they get out of 18” height because of tipping, and the tipping changed the score of something, you get disqualified for causing them to break a rule. (As what I can tell because of the logic)
I think we should wait until Q&A’s are open to get clarification about this.
I don’t think OP was planning on tipping anyone. I just think that they wanted to see if they could (legally) reach over and out of the expansion zone.