Hey guys, I was wondering what you think the best design is in the current meta. Because catapults are to easy to block, however more accurate. I was thinking maybe flywheel on a stick. What are your thoughts?
There are a lot of ongoing topics about this.
In my opinion it is a 7 motor drive with a 11 watt intake if you are going for competition. If you are going for skills and competition it is a good idea to do a 66 watt drive 11 watt shooter mech, and a 11 watt intake. Do not ever do a 2, 3, or 4 motor drive. you will never be competitive with that.
This is quite the statement. Just because most top teams use 6 motor drives in over under doesn’t mean that 4 motor drives are unviable.
I never like seeing people dissing a strategy just because no top teams do it. Yes, more motors on the drive is better. But not all teams have access to plenty of resources. And that’s when you really see teams get innovative.
Doing something because everybody else does it doesn’t use the engineering design process and that’s pretty lame.
Obviously only do the 6 motor drive if you have the resources but it is problably the most competitive drivetrain out there.
Agreeing with @Micahy321 , from my sister team’s experience at SkillsUSA (skills comeptitions), most of the robots at states are hero bots and/or have 2 motor drives and are quite competitive. Due to the lack of opposing robots, we prefer to use our motors for other mechanisms. Even now, some people at my club question my use of a 44w drive saying that it’s overkill.
However, if you do decide to compete in VRC with opposing robots, I would not recommend using a 22w drive as you’ll get bullied like a tadpole.
But to contribute something to the OP’s post, launchers are being used less, and it matters more about whether or not your alliance partner can keep control of the triballs and not lose them to the opposing team.
I’m not talking about skills USA, I’m talking about VRC.
without pnuematics I half to use 4 
@madisogl, same. My team doesn’t have pneumatics yet (fingers crossed). Because of this, we’ve ended up using a 4m drive, a 1m intake, 1m flywheel, and 1m lift for flywheel. Could we make our drivetrain a 55w drivetrain? Sure, if we had 5.5w motors…
@Wesley13406D, I get that 6m are “better” in some ways. However, many teams have resource constraints that can make having a 6m drive difficult while still being otherwise competitive (i.e., with intake and shooting mech).
I would also like to add that 4m drives are actually reasonably competitive in my region (east PA). My sister team has a 4m drive for the same reason we do, and they’ve been in the top few teams at the competitions they’ve gone to.
I would say this is a different design from most but flywheel on a dr4b is really good with like wings or something else. At first comp someone brought a flywheel and dr4b and they shot so high no one could block them and they also had a blocker because of the dr4b.
true, thats one of the things i hate about vrc. I wish they put a drivetrain limit.
Besides 7 motor drive so you could have a intake
and maybe a 5.5 watt flywheel
idk
This opinion has many oversights.
For example,
There are many catapults that do. Also, you don’t really need a good arch for the evolving meta, and you mostly need it for skills.
There are catapults that are faster for match loading than flywheels on sticks. Mainly because a) Flywheels on sticks require aim to place, while catapults don’t really (just put it in the bucket), and b) Flywheels on sticks do have a reload time as the flywheel will slow down after you place a triball on it (physics). I’m not saying that it’s objectively better, but I think that it’s probably faster.
Also use spellcheck. I see ZERO punctuation in your post, and it’s very difficult to read.
That’s fair I did not notice that so you won congrats!!