Scioly.org

Early in the year we had a car that was running around 3 to 4 seconds. After a complete rebuild of the car and launcher, we were able to get a run time of 1.4 seconds at state (we started building the new launcher 5 days before the state competition )

Cheese_Muffin_Man wrote:What times are people looking at right now? Our current car is about 4.6 ish seconds

Fastest I've seen was around 2.5

Wow, with a run time of 1.4 seconds, I wonder what kind of stopping accuracy you have. Its got to be light and movin' fast so I imagine you'd have to factor in a lot of skid.

We get around 3 seconds pretty consistently so we'd have to get over 8cm closer than you to compensate for a speed like that.

Just in general, when you guys are all listing your times, with what distance are we talking about?

And what do you guys make of this? As you guys know, there's a rule stating that we can't have any part of the scrambler not touching the ground before launch touch it afterwards. Well, my event supervisor at state didn't like that rule at all, so he tells all of the teams that would have otherwise been tiered to simply put a paper on the ground where their weight would have touched the floor. I personally didn't care he did that, but can a supervisor do that, when it could very well influence the competition?

nxtscholar wrote:Just in general, when you guys are all listing your times, with what distance are we talking about?

And what do you guys make of this? As you guys know, there's a rule stating that we can't have any part of the scrambler not touching the ground before launch touch it afterwards. Well, my event supervisor at state didn't like that rule at all, so he tells all of the teams that would have otherwise been tiered to simply put a paper on the ground where their weight would have touched the floor. I personally didn't care he did that, but can a supervisor do that, when it could very well influence the competition?

Remember, the time is only from .2m-8.2m no matter what.

Cheese_Muffin_Man wrote:

nxtscholar wrote:Just in general, when you guys are all listing your times, with what distance are we talking about?

And what do you guys make of this? As you guys know, there's a rule stating that we can't have any part of the scrambler not touching the ground before launch touch it afterwards. Well, my event supervisor at state didn't like that rule at all, so he tells all of the teams that would have otherwise been tiered to simply put a paper on the ground where their weight would have touched the floor. I personally didn't care he did that, but can a supervisor do that, when it could very well influence the competition?

Remember, the time is only from .2m-8.2m no matter what.

Oh, I apologize. That was negligence of not reading the rules adequately on my part.

Personally, I don't like the idea that a supervisor gave them the idea to put a piece of paper down. Many of the best ES's I've ever met wanted students to succeed, and would let us do what we could (within the rules) to fix an issue on the devices, but they would never offer up ideas until after we were done competing. (ex, my freshman year our helicopter ES watched as we completely failed to make a helicopter fly, when we were done we were still trying to get it to work, so he gave us a suggestion, and it worked first time :/ )

Of course, I like the idea of the paper in general

Be careful, though - I was at an invitational in which the Scrambler supervisor was the national supervisor, and he tiered a device that had cardboard under the weight on the grounds that the purpose of the rule was to protect the gym floor, and the cardboard did not do that.

Flavorflav wrote:Be careful, though - I was at an invitational in which the Scrambler supervisor was the national supervisor, and he tiered a device that had cardboard under the weight on the grounds that the purpose of the rule was to protect the gym floor, and the cardboard did not do that.

I agree that the cardboard/paper issue isn't exactly what the rule intended, but I think it's unfair to rule based on what was intended since other teams wouldn't know what the writers meant, they only know what it says.

Flavorflav wrote:Be careful, though - I was at an invitational in which the Scrambler supervisor was the national supervisor, and he tiered a device that had cardboard under the weight on the grounds that the purpose of the rule was to protect the gym floor, and the cardboard did not do that.

We changed our launcher a few days before the event so that the weight fell on a two inch thick piece of foam instead of a piece of 1/8" white-board since the white-board was getting pretty beat up and we thought that a judge might tier us for just that reason.

BTW, our times suffered by a few tenths of a second losing that two inches of fall!