I really wish we could have played with you guys sometime during the tournament. And as far as loosing to you guys in robot skills, I will admit there is no other team I would want to be second to.
-Taylor
Thanks Taylor. The respect is mutual for your team as well! Good luck to you and your teammates as you move on to bigger things next year in college. All the best to you.
Bill
This was a great year as far as the amount of variety of different strategies that teams used to score. There are a few teams that impressed me greatly though. 254a(not sure where you got the idea, but it seemed very prominent among Chinese robots), 10b(refreshing spin off of the poofs design), 1(amazing robot in how original it was), 44(completely original idea with a great strategy as far as locking up points) I still think team 44 could’ve won if they picked my team,918, as their alliance.
But 10B wasn’t a poofs spinoff at all… they were bucket-shovel, with a pneumatics launcher. Did you mean 575? (or 10Q, 10E, 10V).
The loading mechanism was different,yes, but they launched it over the wall with pneumatics, which was the point I was attempting to get across.
On a different note, I’m very curious about what others thought about 10b or 39, which were both very interesting.
Team 10B is a six-person rookie 9th-grade team. These guys are as serious as a heart attack and worked very hard on that robot. A video is up of one of their matches, and I think it shows that they have what it takes to be a great team in a year or two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtokqz7HInw. Pretty good defense by a straight-dive robot against a slide-drive 'bot. I don’t pretend to be unbiased, but these guys are already good and are going to be very good. I also think someone missed a bet by not picking them as their alliance partner. The one vital skill they haven’t learned yet is marketing their team before alliance selection.
Agreed. They were our fifth choice though. Right after our second pick, 368E, who were a great asset to our alliance. They were right before 39 on our list too.
8192A - Personally liked it due to its quick dump and totally point-scoring autonomous. Coincidentally, their design was pretty much exactly like the one 2453 used at Pan-Pacific (folding scoop, large basket). One of our drivers jokingly bragged that we HAD a “World Championship winning” robot design. 
44 - Their autonomous and dump was just flat out scary to watch o_O; I was really impressed at how you guys managed to score in the triangle goals, considering I never saw any robot that did it.
Other teams worth mentioning are the New Zealand teams, 918, 1, 394, and 359A.
haha
i see a similar one just on the other side of the field
hope to see them on the “epic” list in a few yrs
now that 575, 721, and 2z is gone
whos left in our area??
Team 44- How could you not be impressed by them, one of the first teams to realise how important locking up green balls was. Then the pop-out wheels, massive scoop. Overall awesome
Team 2921- Congrats on winning, 2921 continued to impress us even though we won the New Zealand Nationals with them.
Team 254(unsure what letter)- They were just a reminder of how lucky we were not to be in their division. That pneumatics boost as the basket was lifting blew us away as we realised how something that simple could be so usefull, and combined with their speed it was a shame they didn’t make it further into the comp.
Now i’m going a little off topic, but does anyone know if the matches that were streamed on the big screens recorded? As we would like to get footage of our games since we ran out of space on our camera, and so we could look at the teams from the other divisions since having a three man team ment we had something to do all the time. If anyone does have any footage of us (2908C) as someone did approach us after one of our games saying they would post it on youtube, it would be greatly appreciated.
Mitch,
Apparently Chris Hamling has a recording of all the live streams on a hard drive.
8192A’s robot was a copy of team 2901s robot , rangitoto’s they have had the same type of robot for a good 8-9 months now.
The chinese’s team just had very good driving and a very good tactic
8192 also did it without using pneumatics.
Their driving was really awesome though!
Yeah , i heard he did too. But it shouldn’t be to hard to find them it would be stupid if vex didn’t record them xD.
I think they are supposed to be on the NASA website later, but they take a long time to put them up, and you can’t download them from there.
After the finals of the divisons one of our Mentors (Steve) got teams that we wanted to play against to play in the practice area. We played with/against some of the teams that we don’t play with locally. The New Zealand teams were great to play with (and to get crushed by when they were on their own alliance) We played until we were out of batteries.
Next year they should keep the practice fields open for some “after event” competitions.
I noticed that too, but I swear that 8192a was 1) extremely well driven, 2) faster dumping and drive train, 3) better coached (didn’t see them get blocked more than 5 times, and I was in their division watching nearly every match as a scout…)
I could really see a great “after party” tournament for anyone willing to spend an extra few hours in the convention center that day or the day after.
It would be a great way to have some fun with other teams without worrying about your robot breaking.
And also compete with teams notorious via youtube and vexforum etc. that you never get a chance to play with due to divisional breakdowns.
That would be great. I really wanted to compete against 1103 just because of their autonomous. Though, my team was fortunate enough to make it far enough into elimination to lose to the green egg robotics alliance.
This may sound sad… But 8192a’s coaching was the girl holding the white ball and jumping up and down when it got intence 