Hi, we have our first LRT event coming up this Sunday and have some last minute emergency questions.
I see the recent update to LRT5 regarding the starting corral for LRT. It seems unclear to me. “The Balls on the “right” side of the Field, as depicted in Figure 22 or when viewed from the “audience side”, are considered in their Starting Corral.”
a) Does this refer to just the 6 balls on the rightmost line? Or the 11 balls that start further to the right than the goal structure? Or the 12 balls on the entire right half of the field?
b) what does it mean for them to be “cleared?” Is the starting corral region that must be cleared still the same as the one defined in “Specific Game Definitions - Starting Corral” or is it just the intersections the balls start in?
Is it legal for a robot to have parts in motion at the start of the match? (one of our teams has a robot with a wheel that sucks in balls. Can that be already spinning at robot startup, as long as no part of the robot is outside the start position?) I feel like this wouldn’t be allowed, but I can’t find a rule about it.
The LRT Overview section says “An Alliance’s score at the end of a Match is calculated by combining the fields of each Team.” Is there a difference here between “combining the fields” and “combining the scores”? For example, do both teams have to clear the corral for it to be considered cleared? or is one team clearing it enough to score? Can it be scored twice if both teams clear the same corral? Last year, the manual said “For all intents and purposes, you can picture the two Teams’ fields being stacked on top of each other and scored as one “Alliance field”.” Is that still true? (For another example, if the combined fields of the two teams included more than 22 scored balls, would all of them count? or would it max out at 22?)
All the definitions and rules in the main part of the game manual still apply in LRTs unless otherwise specified. The LRT section does not provide an LRT-specific definition of “Starting Corral”, so based on the definition on page 8, I would say that just the 6 balls that start on the rightmost line are in the starting corral. I think part of the point of that figure in <LRT5> is to clarify that although those balls start on the line (rather than in the middle of the white areas) they are still in the corral, since the corral includes the full width of that particular line.
My gut says no here too, but I agree that no rule explicitly prohibits motors from moving before the start of the match as long as the robot stays in the size constraints. That said, we may be in G3 territory here – “robots can’t move before the match starts” seems like a pretty basic idea.
<LRT5> says:
which suggests to me that, in an LRT, you can only get the points for clearing the corral once, and the corral on both fields needs to be clear of balls to get the points (one corral per match, not one per field).
They would all count. There is no rule prohibiting teams from scoring more than 22 balls; 22 is simply the number of balls in play in an in-person match. In an LRT match, there are 44 balls in play (22 on each field), and all 44 can be scored at once.
I had a memory of this being OK, perhaps in a previous game. I checked the Q&A but see no clarification this season on this issue. Without a rule explicitly saying you can’t do this, I believe this to be perfectly legal. Perhaps a Q&A is in order to set that policy in stone.
One more thing: not that it matters though. Before the manual update, it pretty explicitly stated that in LRT there were 2 starting corals, hence the rule that says all rules for the teamwork version are the same for LRT (unless it said so in the LRT section, which it didn’t). The GDC said in the update that they “clarified” the rule, when it was arguably not even a rule in the first place. Additionally, in the LRT software, it previously let you enter two cleared corrals for each team, implying that you started the match with one cleared corral (5 points). So I’m glad they made their intent clear, although their wording leaves something to be desired. But again this is pretty trivial and doesn’t matter that much.
Q&A has been answered on the one I submitted. I will admit, I often know what the GDC is going to say to most of the questions, this one I did not expect. @holbrook
Where do I go to submit a Q&A and to see yours?