I am currently debating with my team if we should have 3 goals at a time so that we can steal the goals in the middle faster or to go for rings.
On one hand, we could grab the goals faster in the middle, allowing us to climb and/or stack goals faster and better.
On the other hand, having a ring intake could allow us to play passive and go for rings.
I am a middle schooler, so mostly no teams are going for rings, and they only have one arm. Then again, that is gonna change as we go into more competitive competition. I talked to my driver, and he is fine with ether one of those, just as long as he gets use to it. Which one should we go for?
I will say that if you aren’t doing rings at all, you really should be using a 6m drive, because it does not take more than 2 motors to hold 3 goals.
But if you do chose to use rings, the ability hold 2 goals at once is pretty important. And with pneumatics, it’s possible to hold 2 goals and do rings still with 6m drive.
The way I see it, the main tradeoff we’re talking about here is a third goal, vs the ability to do rings.
That third goal can be what wins you a match, however I believe that it will be less advantageous in high level matches, because I don’t think any robot will have time to grab 3 goals on the field before the other 3 robots have already grabbed the rest. But in most matches, having that third goal can be hugely advantageous, especially if your partner can only hold 1 or none.
at the same time, rings are also very advantageous, as with ring abilities you theoretically have access to around 48 additional points (with 16 toal alliance goal rings).
So if the choice is between one or the other, it really just depends on what direction you want to take your robot. Theoretically, it is possible to do both rings and hold 3 goals, but that will of course be more difficult than doing either.
The choice on whether to do rings or have the capacity for a third goal is mostly up to what you think you can do, and what it is like in your region. If you are in a region where everyone can carry 2 goals, it will be pretty hard to get 3 goals in a match so I would suggest rings. If you are in a region where most teams can’t grab 2 goals, being able to park with 3 would be formidable. If you are in a region with a mix, I would say it is up to which one you could do more efficiently. If you can only score 6 rings per match, the third goal would be much more effective. It is honestly up to a lot of factors, and you should weigh the pros and cons to choose which one to do.
In my region, a lot of teams are going for 2 goals at a time, so I guess it would be harder to go for 3 goals in a match. However, the power to park with 3 goals (2 from our own team goals and 1 from the middle goals) is really good. Also I should say this, but our current robot has a four bar, so we can stack goals on top of the platform as a second option if we manage to get all of the goals.
I guess it is up for our team to decide where we want to take our robot, but sometimes its really hard for us to decide on a design choice for our robot. One day we decide on one, and the next day we decide on something else. But for now though, our team would like to climb with as many goals as we can get while having the option to stack our goals, so I think that the 3 goals is better as of now.