Should the GDC’s build a robot and play against the world champions?
A better question would be, should the GDC build a robot of how they expected the game to be played.
- Andrew
Why? We’d get our butts kicked!
I know how many hours you guys spend building and refining your robots – there is no way we’d be able to compete with that kind of time.
-John
No.
This is why I voted no.
The GDC ought to have little to no preconceived notion of the robots that “should” play the game. The GDC’s focus should be on gamesmanship, strategy, and challenge, not designing for cool features or to highlight components (see JVN’s response to the Claw discussion)
there is a difference between “expected” and “should” be. Ask the FTC GDC. They had no idea they would get 20 foot lifts this year.
- Andrew
20-foot lifts? This I want to see! Any pics or vids?
These two robots were twins and were the tallest there. They could lift 6 crates no problems, they however never did lift 6 during the competition since the game was to short. The most I saw in one robot was 4 at FTC worlds. -They won the entire thing-
- Andrew
And we thought 30 inches was tall :] c’mon VEX, where are the 10 foot goals?
WOAH, THAT IS EPIC. 8O
How did they not fall over?
I was actually competing on the “Curie” field for FRC and saw one of the FTC scissor lifts fall on another scissor lift at the same height - on the other field.
That is utterly brilliant. So in the manual it says that each crate is worth points if there are balls scored in it and it is above 10.5". They are worth more points for every 6" they are above that. So 20’, 40x6": about 400 points per crate, plus whatever’s in them. I thought our design scored a ton of points…
On the note about the GDC, they just don’t spend the same amount of time as we do perfecting our bots. They might know the theoretical game dynamics in and out, but really, it’ll turn out something completely unexpected will happen. Each year, there’s always something that crops up and blows any preconceived notions about how to play out of the water, so even if they had the time to spend building, and the same experience with Vex parts that we do, they don’t have much of an advantage.