Personally I think that even in the mid season hook is better for a lot of teams (my team included).
The way I see it is that while yes a hook clamp needs to be better than a hood clamp I don’t see why that matters to most teams because I feel that you should regardless of your mogo scoring mech you should be trying to build the best clamp you can. If your clamp is so inaccurate or loose that it only works with hood I think your should evaluate it the problem is your hook/hood or your low quality clamp.
Also speed, while I have seen some good hoods that some teams have made that work very efficient, I think that you need to consider 2 things with that. First is that most hooks overall are just faster, just flat out. Secondly is that to get a hood that fast takes a lot of tuning, and while getting your hooks to score reliably can take some tuning I think that the hook tuning to score efficiently is a lot less and a lot more worth it than the hood tuning just to be competitively fast.
Wall stakes has been overplayed here but ill put in my 2 cents while I’m here. Yes in the standard meta wall stakes is hook lady brown mech. However first off we have seen a few hood lady browns now, lady brown is no longer hook exclusive (although it is generally faster). Secondly is considering non-meta wall stakes. I think that for the mogo its definitely the best to go with one of the two just because those are pretty proven mechs. But wall stakes is where I think teams should get creative and go off meta. One of my mentors once said “If you just copy the meta or best designs at the time then the absolute best your team can do is be as good as those teams. But a team that makes their own designs and ideas has unlimited potential”. This really resonated with wall stakes because yes lady brown is fast, but their is a possibility that you could be faster with your idea. As well as ultimately the point of VEX is to creatively design. To be the best team you can you have to make yourself the team that others hole count, not the one that hole counts others. Thats not to say get in your head and think you are going to be better than those teams, and I’m not saying that my team is, but I’m saying by being a copy cat you limit your potential and you are no longer being creative.
I resonate with your sentiment but this is simply not true. The first hook bot I ever saw was 2145Z. Are they the best hook bot? The first Lady Brown I saw was 18522R. They are definitely not the best Lady Brown out there.
You need to remember that in the real world, engineering does not happen in a vacuum. You build off ideas and concepts, even if you did not come up with them yourself.
I’m not saying I know everything, I just stayed at a Holiday inn last night
I agree with you. The point is that those ideas are building on the originals in some way shape or form. Recently I’ve seen to many hole counts that just copy without improving on the design, the way to become a better team is to improve on things. Just make sure you change things to actually make your bot better. To your example if everyone did 1:1 with the 18522R lady brown without changing anything or building then the 18522R lady brown would be the best. My point is that meta is good but building on the pre existing meta is better.
We are in the same division as overclock and compete with them regularly. It is a insane mech we would build it but as we are in the same division it would be obvious we copied them. Side note we were there when rhey broke the skills record.
for us we find it easier to use hook when getting on the goal because the hook helps keep the ring in place. we starte with hood in early season but have switched to hoook for ease of use.
It seems like every signature event since speedway has hook lady brown as higher seeds, and I’m not sure if I even saw a hood intake at Kalahari, so I think hook is better.
I agree, I was at Kalahari and I saw almost no hoods present. They are very hard to work with when it comes to wall stakes and a well-tuned hook mechanism is much more efficient for scoring rings. The ability to pull the rings down and then separate the hook from the ring in the descent has proved vital for us throughout the season.
we have a pretty strong hood mechanism and very good wall stakes but the tuning for the hood is so brutal because you have to tune the pressure and output perfectly to make it work fast.
That’s exactly why we went hook. We actually didn’t have to tune our hook at all on this re build (got lucky ig), we would have spent more time than our meetings permits for a hood, and we are still very fast. I’d rather spend my time on other parts of the bot if I can.