Will anyone try to be holding 2 stars this year? My teammate believes we can hold 2 stars at once but I find this not very possible. Should our design consist of holding 1 star or 2 stars?
I daresay a lot of teams (ours included) are aiming for somewhere between 4-6 stars. While at first stars seem huge, the key is to remember that the stars need not be within your central robot area. If you have a rack, feeder, huge intake, or huge launcher, you can definitely fit more than 1 star onto your robot at a time.
However, if you’ve got a solid 1 star design, I would build it first and get it to at least 75% functional before rebuilding for 2 stars - better to have reliable 1 star than half-finished 17 star 
I agree, we should be able to move as many stars as possible.
I’m hoping to grab one and fire it as soon as it is grabbed, with minimal reload time. This, to me, would be better than a grape shot catapult as I’m not lugging around the extra weight, especially as I don’t need to build an expanding chassis/intake.
This seams like a good strategy for the start of the season, but remembering that we can expand we could have some rack of sorts and be able to multiple cubes and stars without driving. Though this year does not take precision in driving it way still win you the match.
Yes, if you cant you probably wont do so great.
You know, a giant scoop/fork would work great for defense as well as offence. You could block off most of the wall. Which leads to another question: Should people make their launcher/lift/some other mechanism be able to go a foot or so above the bar to avoid blocking?
I had the idea of possibly remaking our NBN robot that won innovate at UK nationals. Just get it to expand wider, and have a way of pushing stars off the lift.
6 stars 
I personally find it unreasonable to hold more than 2 or 3 stars.
It seems like it will slow down your robot and even make it uneven on sides.
Plus, only having half of the field to your team, there isn’t much reason to hold more than 2 or 3 because, you don’t really need to drive a far distance or take time to pick up lots of stars.
So, most likely my team will hold up to 4 stars.
@Data I didn’t mean to suggest that our robot is close to completion (or even started yet, for that matter)
Without getting too much into specifics, one of my robot ideas consisted of a high-capacity launcher that extended only 24" across, but also several feet up into the air. While this whole mechanism would be very heavy, it wouldn’t significantly impact space, and using either a whole lot of motors or several pneumatic pistons, we were hoping to bombard the opponents with 4-6 stars all at once, all aimed for their high goal.
This design also utilizes the stars’ ability to tessellate as a potent advantage. Based on my own (probably incomplete) analysis of intake ideas, there isn’t a single good intake on the forums that can pick up stars that have become entangled with each other into a huge mess. If we can launch this giant blob of yellow foam right for the other team’s hanging bar, and then they can’t pick up the stars to shoot back or move the mass out of the way to hang, we feel that we can submerge the opponent and achieve a complete win.
I noticed that I’m not the only one with bold 6 star claims, and while I might need to admit that it won’t work revise my design a little, I hope that our collective brainpower can achieve this goal 
@Bobtheblob - 5327B I still don’t see the reason to launch six stars. If you can quickly launch 1 star at a time it should be good enough. I can’t think of any way to stack the stars on an intake effectively, without it being huge.
Yeah, I actually saw this when I did IQ this year, when we were making a high dumper. We tried to make the biggest high dumper ever, it could hold 30 balls. While we knew it was going to be slow, we thought our capacity to overtake our speed. And it couldn’t. Speedier high dumpers almost always beat us. I think we really need to consider the trade off of capacity v speed, and I think 2 stars quickly would work better than 6 stars slowly.
Basically, a faster mechanism and a higher capacity mechanism are two different approaches to the same end: a high rate of scoring (ROS). Each team needs to determine how long it would take their robot to fill their mechanism and score all of the stars, and do the same with half capacity and a single star. Basically, the graph of ROS vs. capacity would look kind of like a negative parabola, with a single point of maximum return (the vertex of the parabola). I’m not sure on the exact shape, and I don’t know enough yet about the system the graph would model to make up a rough equation for it. If someone else can though, go ahead.
I believe that the majority of the state winning teams for this season will be able to hold more stars than the other teams. My club is going to experiment with this but @lanier1926 is correct. It will be better to hold 2 stars and be able to move quicker than have 6 stars and move slowly.
Intersting calculation: 3 stars is almost identical in weight to one cube.
So, if your launcher launches three stars into the corner, it will alsolaunch the cube into the corner.
Actually, in Skyrise some teams were able to hold 4 cubes at once and still lift fairly fast. I cheched and and cubes actually weigh a little bit more than twice as much as the stars. The teams that I saw that could lift 4 cubes were mostly rd4b’s as well with a 1:7 gear ratio and this year we will only need to lift up to a minimum of 24." (Unless you have a launcher)
I would just like to emphasize this. Those cubes were heavy and lots of teams were easily picking up 3 or 4 very quickly. We seem to have a very short memory about how past games went. I have no doubt teams will be picking up more than 2 stars and launching them across to the far zone.
Just my 2 cents: the cubes have a kind of pillowy cushy quality that seems born to suck up energy. I hope somebody will prove me wrong, but it seems to me that a mechanism that can launch a star X distance won’t necessarily be able to launch a cube that same distance.