Two of our brand new yellow stars (jacks), were slightly bent, and immediately after snapped. Has this happened to anyone else, or exclusively us?
This hasn’t happened to my team but at worlds I heard that they are pretty fragile and have a tendency to break.
I also haven’t broken any of mine but I know of people who have cough cough @Harrison2 and @Baron Boopington
Yep, though apparently we aren’t supposed to take them apart.
There’s a picture of the head of the GDC holding a star broken just like that, about 2 minutes after the game was revealed and people were allowed to see them. They’re not top quality though I’m hoping through the season they’ll improve the construction.
Probably some wires or internal frame.
Two of ours broke the first day we had them. I don’t see how a set will last an entire season.
I want to see that picture.
We only had one of our’s break. You wanna know our secret?
We only let robots touch the stars
But yeah, the stars definitely aren’t the best. And a thing about vex making money, they don’t. Their products are admittedly overpriced but they aren’t overpriced because khartik digs dat cash flo. It’s because not many people buy their products. If you want something to be cheap as consumer goods you have to have lots of consumers. They really do try to sell their products at very close to how much it costed them to manufacture.
But still dem stars are expensive as ****
(Plz don’t sue me)
A picture
Thats amazing. My new wallpaper.
I agree, it makes more sense to buy a more expensive product that will last and is more resilient, than a cheap one that will break in a few days to a couple weeks.
As far as quality went for NbN year, the extra squish in the balls added a whole new level of design in robots. If they were all the same squish, the game would become boring because virtually any design works well then. The way I see it, they made the game much more fun by adding another challenge-- and if they saved a couple bucks in the manufacturing process, good for them.
I’m very concerned for this year though. The stars should be able to handle impacts from launching, infact if we know the velocity before impact we can calculate the force of rapid deacceleration and figure out the maximum force they can handle from X height. What I’m more concerned about is push bots. Like any other year, there will be swarms of them from new teams and they will undoubtedly try to push stars against walls and under the fence. Something that has a lot more power than just falling from a launch, and something that will likely be the bane of this year’s competition hosts.
Lost our first one a few days ago and that was with students simulating a robot throwing it over the fence. I’m worried about how many will break during an actual event.
i already broke 2 and one i didn’t even throw! i just set my robots lift on it so i could get under to fix something. and it wasn’t a lot of weight. i would rather have a more expensive product that lasts longer than a cheap one that breaks.
is there a glue that will work on these?..maybe they are repairable
Hot melt glue has been recommended in other places on the Forum.
Something I like about FTC is (atleast last year, my team’s first year) game design and the game pieces seem to just be better. For NbN the balls had to be carefully stacked in pyramids but for RES-Q you literally dump the game pieces at random, for NbN the nets fell apart really easily, for RES-Q there were very sturdy mountains made mostly of metal. Now for Starstruck the gameplay from an old game is being recycled and the stars that are meant to be thrown around are fragile, can’t wait to see the next game for FTC.