Given no penalty and no limit on the pneumatic cylinders, appropriate funding to buy them, and multitude of examples from the past seasons, I am sure, that plenty of teams will come up with very capable designs by mid-summer.
Seeing many multi-goal carrying robots back in ITZ season gives me some confidence. And, also, total motor power was way less then, than what is available with V5 now.
Here is a couple of interesting videos of 169A ITZ skills bot that had a pneumatic launcher:
I think, having something similar to pick up two mobile goals on both front and back of a TiP robot is perfectly doable. Then with a few extra cylinders you could lock the goals on each tray, making it impossible to steal them without damaging either the robot or the goal itself.
Once again, this all will be coming down to funding and being able to execute goal capturing strategy without mistakes during the first few seconds of the autonomous.
Also, here is a post from team 62 featuring a kickstand, among many other clever optimizations they made on that robot:
@Jon_Jack, don’t get me wrong, if I was competing this season with many years of vex experience behind my back, I would be super excited about the challenge of saving fractions of a second to sprint forward and snatch that neutral goal. And I would love the task of building the robot with a fancy transmission to shift the power between 8 motor drive and an auxiliary ring scoring mechanism.
But, if I was coaching a school team of the bright and talented students from a district with limited budget, I would be very disappointed. Because, as of right now, there is a strong impression that, unless you invest a lot of money into extra hardware, no amount of hard work, creativity, and dedication is going to be able to compensate for your funding disadvantage.
I think, the right call from GDC would be, for instance, to impose a one motor penalty for each air tank, to level the playing field, and to give students more reasons to think about the wider variety of potential designs and strategies, instead of concentrating on optimizing every last millisecond out of the narrow set of designs.