Is it a hard plastic, inflatable soft plastic, or something else? It would be nice to know the exact plastic type, but not necessary. Thank you.
Hard plastic similar to the Gateway objects.
are they easily squished?
They might compress a tiny bit, but not really. I would say they are firmer than the Gateway balls were (or at least they’re firmer than the ones we still have lying around).
thank you. Now I know that they won’t get stuck in a mechanism.
Yeah, they’re not like the Sacks from last year. Don’t worry about them getting stuck.
They are harder to compress than gateway objects because it is made of many faces instead of continuous shape. If your mechanism requires a little squishing of objects you can always drill a little in them.
Why in the world would this be a good design practice? Lets modify the ball to what might not be standard from VEX at the competition. Even though we know where to drill a hole in to equalize pressure and maintain shape of the ball at different altitudes doesn’t mean you should go drilling holes in it for your design to work better.
Unless you are attending a high altitude tournament (hello, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming), you cannot count on the event director to have made holes in the buckyballs.
I don’t plan on doing it myself or to any of my teams balls but I was just pointing out that it would be legal to do so but probably a little unsportsmanlike to do it for a benefit other than uniform shape across altitudes. Sorry for the confusion.
No confusion, I just did not want students to think they can count on the balls having holes in them. This includes, “Do not think that a tournament director will let you make holes in their buckyballs.”
O, I see your point. If someone had built a robot that picked up balls with drilled holes better than without holes they would try to start drilling balls at worlds and that would be a whole big deal and against the rules.
I had only really thought about doing it at a competition you were hosting you could do it. Legal but totally unethical.
I really don’t see why it would be legal unless you had a reason to, and we already know that that reason is. Can we stop seeding bad ideas to teams?