Like most of us already know, in these competitions there’s always a main stream design that is VERY prevalent at worlds. With it being a little over a month away, what is your prediction on this year’s main stream design? There’s been alot of recent hype about using a slip gear launcher for a full court shot, and using another launcher for fielding. This is my prediction on what is to be the main stream design, and I would love to hear input from other teams!
I’m just gonna say in general the puncher will be a very popular design at world’s whether it’s a Nautilus gear or a slip gear
For us in Texas that is old style, we hade those in December. Now it is a single 4 motor flywheel with a 6 motor extreme speed drive with a 400x intake (the best style of intake). That is one design that we will see a lot of. But also we will see the dual linear puncher with lift design.
Could you explain 400x’s intake?
Right now I would prefer the world not knowing what it is like, if we attend worlds it will be a great advantage to us.
The design versatility is not as good as Skyrise in my opinion, but definitely better than sack attack and toss up. There are a few main stream designs (double fw, single fw, linear puncher, ramp, lift, top roller ball intake) and combinations of them, as well as some other less popular but nonetheless successful designs. I’m satisfied with the design versatility.
In Georgia I’d say its a single flywheel/LP
I’d say that the linear puncher will be very prevalent, as well as single flywheels(especially short range). I think a design that will really be dominant though will be the rotational catapult/puncher. It is a design which uses a slip gear attached to a rotating arm which uses rubber bands for propulsion. Although our team did not opt for this design, I think it will really turn some heads.
I’m not sure if they’re still using it but it’s kinda like 62’s reveal. Check out 400x’s fb page
As for main stream, is guess something like the:
Discobots, 2’s hybrid, 400x, 8059a.
I think worlds will have less nautalis cams and more slip gears.
I think we will see a lot of Fast Field Bots and hybrid flywheels.
On youtube there seems to be a lot of puncher/flywheel hybrids (2Z, 9090A, Swampbotics, 7983G just to list a few) and on the forums there seems to be a multitude of lifting robots, as seen in this https://vexforum.com/t/weight-of-robot/33598/1 thread.
I think that the puncher/ single flywheel hybrid will be the most common design at worlds because it seems as everyone is changing to this in the late season as I saw at the state competitions. At worlds, this will be the most common design but i still think we will see many double flywheels as well but not nearly as many as single flywheels. I also anticipate seeing many more lifting robots at worlds.
I think we’ll see a lot of 6 turbo motor drives for dedicated fielding bots, which I think will be excellent for eliminations.
For robots that can do driver loads, it will probably be any sort of hybrid: flywheel with puncher, hammer, etc…
For lifts, I expect the mainstream design to be the 4 bar lift that most people already use.
Lastly, we will probably see far too many elastic intakes 
However, what comes after the elastic intake will set apart the good robots and the bad ones. The intake is the hardest part to build this year because it has to deal with a lot of game objects quickly and efficiently or the other team could win. Lifts we’ve done since the beginning of vex, and drives are nothing new. Launchers are new, but there are so many tutorials and references you could probably make one easily from a few videos. Intakes however, have not had anything that places them in the spotlight yet.
Hybrids, are going to be the mainstream design this year. They are easy to make and efficient in both in fielding and outfielding, but hard to perfect both. They also have to worry about lifting if they don’t have one and whether they can be lifted. Next most common will probably single flywheels, then double flywheels, then punchers and catapults of any sort. Versatile and accurate punchers are hard to make, but they can easily match a slightly less accurate flywheel with faster fire rates. Worlds is going to go to a team who can sweep quickly on a fast base and quick intake, fire efficiently and accurately (not necessarily the fastest), and then have a lift on their alliance.