General competition discussion

[brouhaha]

what did you guys think of mission at regionals?

[brouhaha]

i was pretty nervous about how i would do today (SE regionals). I quintuple checked every thing so i would'n mess up. It was a big relief to see that my device made it through the first few seconds(7 of the 10 tasks occur in this time frame). I suppose I was really only nervous about a new part i just put in on Saturday. I hate last minute changes, but this one was for the better. I only got to test it once before packing up and leaving. Now that I've seen it all work more than once, i feel much more confident for future competitions.

how have your devices been fairing?

[Primate]

what did you guys think of mission at regionals?

To be honest, I wish you got as many runs as you needed during your thirty minute set-up period. I know, I know, it would be unreliable, since the judge can't perfectly mimic the time it takes for him to go through the TSL with each event, but it would at least give dumb mistakes a second chance. I connected my battery backwards, since I had to swap it out at the last second .

Each competition is definitely a learning experience, though. I tend to break my devices on the way to competition, so I always end up spending the thirty minutes reconstructing rather than fine-tuning. I'm crossing my fingers that this does extremely well at states, though.

[Paradox21]

At my regional competition I did a practice run during the 30 minutes of prep time and had a time that was 1 second over 60 seconds and everything else perfect. When I went to re-setup I found out that a gear on my moving mass bonus had JUST broken off. Oddly, it was only a gear that slowed down the gear reducation so the bonus still functioned but it was the bonus I used to adjust how long the device ran so all of my calibrations flew out the window. I ended up powering it with a few less batteries and just setting it to run as long as possible and it actually ended up running too long . Luckily the rest of my region is not very good and I still got 1st.

[they might be boned]

Our thing ended up being 4 mm too big.

So we were second tiered from the start, and then the golf ball ended up raising the flag. Very frustrating. And we finished 14th somehow.

[hscmom]

With 61 seconds at Regionals we got gold! Yippee.

[Balsa Man]

With 61 seconds at Regionals we got gold! Yippee.

Nicely done. Looking forward to meeting you at State. Do you happen to know what sort of time Cheyenne Mtn (who came in second in your regionals) got?

[masterhat]

I have found that many teams are already getting perfect scores. I am afraid that the time tiebreaker will determine the winner at nationals (this is bad because this is based on the judge's reaction time). What do you suggest happens at nationals (the supervisor could use a camera to record, another idea that i had was a photogate)?

[Sir_L_Jenkins]

I have found that many teams are already getting perfect scores. I am afraid that the time tiebreaker will determine the winner at nationals (this is bad because this is based on the judge's reaction time). What do you suggest happens at nationals (the supervisor could use a camera to record, another idea that i had was a photogate)?

I think they should just make the flagpole be the secondary tiebreaker (or just axe the specific time tiebreaker to how it originally was), it would allow much more creativity and solve the subjectivity problem of tenths or hundredths of a second

[maggymay]

kinda OT but right now ?...having serious trouble getting anything to work. we are so in over our heads it's not even funny. a perfect score ?...for me I think I'll be happy if we get any single task to work, much less first/final/timed-step/whatever.