Scrambler B

[dragonfruit35]

Hey guys... I just wanted to check in with what I had seen at my regional and another regional I went to. Distances were 10m at the other regional and 12m at my regional. It was extremely easy to get a medal in both regionals, as long as your car did not have any violations, didn't break the egg, went 8.5 meters, and didn't exit the 1.5 meter track. In fact, simply meeting these guidelines almost guaranteed a medal. (These are Virginia regionals, not amazingly competitive but still relatively competitive.)

My team finished first with a distance from target of 36 cm and a run time of 2.3 seconds. I used a spring launcher and a balsa wood ETV. The stop distance wasn't great but after seeing how everyone else did we decided to play it safe and not risk breaking the egg.

I also wanted to thank everyone on this forum who provided help on my launcher, ETV, and more as well as answering the many questions I had.

How weird is that?! I went to the same regional and got second in Scrambler. I watched your run-didn't realize mine was that close to yours. We got 38cm. It was incredibly easy to get a medal, for sure...

[GoofyFoofer]

I've looked through the rules and I can't find any penalty to braking the egg besides not getting a second run. In fact, as breaking the egg means the contact point distance to the center of the barrier is the score, it seems beneficial, at least on the second run. Am I missing something?

[bernard]

I've looked through the rules and I can't find any penalty to braking the egg besides not getting a second run. In fact, as breaking the egg means the contact point distance to the center of the barrier is the score, it seems beneficial, at least on the second run. Am I missing something?

Breaking an egg incurs a Competition Violation of 1,000 points (4.k. and 5.d.).

[GoofyFoofer]

Thanks.
One more question...
To clarify, does the second run affect the total score in any way if it is worse than the first one? (in other words, if anything goes wrong for the second run, does it affect the final score if the first run is the best of the two?)

[bernard]

Thanks.
One more question... :mrgreen:
To clarify, does the second run affect the total score in any way if it is worse than the first one? (in other words, if anything goes wrong for the second run, does it affect the final score if the first run is the best of the two?)

The better score is taken. If one run has competition violations while the other has no violations, your score will likely be the one with no violations. But there aren't tiers involved. You can play with the scoresheet on the national website.

[sciencecat42]

Thanks.
One more question...
To clarify, does the second run affect the total score in any way if it is worse than the first one? (in other words, if anything goes wrong for the second run, does it affect the final score if the first run is the best of the two?)

The better score is taken. If one run has competition violations while the other has no violations, your score will likely be the one with no violations. But there aren't tiers involved. You can play with the scoresheet on the national website.

Our event supervisor for regionals said that breaking an egg in the second run would impact our score for both, is this true? Also, would this apply for any other violations? (If you had any competition violations in one run, would it still add to the score of the other run if you had no violations in that?)

[dragonfruit35]

Thanks.
One more question...
To clarify, does the second run affect the total score in any way if it is worse than the first one? (in other words, if anything goes wrong for the second run, does it affect the final score if the first run is the best of the two?)

The better score is taken. If one run has competition violations while the other has no violations, your score will likely be the one with no violations. But there aren't tiers involved. You can play with the scoresheet on the national website.

Our event supervisor for regionals said that breaking an egg in the second run would impact our score for both, is this true? Also, would this apply for any other violations? (If you had any competition violations in one run, would it still add to the score of the other run if you had no violations in that?)

As far as I know, breaking your egg in the second run should not impact your score for the first run. At regionals, our first run was clean and the second run received a competition violation for going outside the track width lines. We asked the event supervisor, and he confirmed that this would not affect our first run's score.

[bernard]

Our event supervisor for regionals said that breaking an egg in the second run would impact our score for both, is this true? Also, would this apply for any other violations? (If you had any competition violations in one run, would it still add to the score of the other run if you had no violations in that?)

As far as I know, breaking your egg in the second run should not impact your score for the first run. At regionals, our first run was clean and the second run received a competition violation for going outside the track width lines. We asked the event supervisor, and he confirmed that this would not affect our first run's score.

If the event supervisor used the scoresheet available on the national website and entered values correctly, your scores should be accurate, even if the supervisor's understanding isn't correct.

[mtaw1]

Taking into account the variability of scales, before competition when our mass is weighed, if the scale reads the mass to be above 2kg, will the competitors be given a chance to remove weight from the mass without penalty?

[chalker]

Taking into account the variability of scales, before competition when our mass is weighed, if the scale reads the mass to be above 2kg, will the competitors be given a chance to remove weight from the mass without penalty?

That's really going to be up to the individual supervisor and amount of time available. This is one of the fundamental issues teams always face - how close to a particular specification to design a device vs. the risk of being marked non-compliant to the rules due to variability in measuring devices. My advice is to always make it easy on the event supervisor - and not risk it.