Scioly.org

First, let me get out that I don't care about this rule; I didn't see it to be a challenge.

Now, I mean honestly, I thought the intent was to provide a challenge in some way or form (although obviously, there are loopholes). But if the intention was to prevent the damage of the floors being used, then I have to say, that is to me sheer idiocy. Most launchers are made of rigid material and quite often can have nails and other rough objects sticking out of them. Even if the weights hit the launcher and not the floor, isn't there still a considerable amount of force to do damage anyways? If anything, if that was their concern, then reduce the maximum weight limit.

joeyjoejoe wrote: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.

Well, without giving too much away, yes, we had to factor in a lot of variables that arose with a faster launcher. We had to spend over 9 hours the day before state (staying at school past midnight) working on improving our distance score. I'd prefer not to say what distances we are getting, but I'll say that there's a compromise between speed and accuracy and you just have to find out what works for you.

Now, I mean honestly, I thought the intent was to provide a challenge in some way or form (although obviously, there are loopholes). But if the intention was to prevent the damage of the floors being used, then I have to say, that is to me sheer idiocy. Most launchers are made of rigid material and quite often can have nails and other rough objects sticking out of them. Even if the weights hit the launcher and not the floor, isn't there still a considerable amount of force to do damage anyways? If anything, if that was their concern, then reduce the maximum weight limit.

I think the reasoning for the rule is to prevent damage to the floor; I don't see why they'd put this rule in as some sort of challenge, as it wouldn't really challenge the science/physics of the Scrambler. I can definitely see why they'd put this rule in protect the floors. My old launcher was denting our school's floor whenever we tested, so we put a piece of carpet underneath the weight and it stopped the dents. No other parts of our launchers or any launchers I have seen have damaged the floors with any "nails and other rough objects sticking out of them".

I don't know. If you were to build some platform to intercept and prevent the weight from hitting the floor, you'd lose some gravitational potential energy. The general observation I made was that not many people thought of using paper (myself included) because we had no idea what our state coordinator wanted.

It's amazing how many people used ramp launchers at states.

nxtscholar wrote:I don't know. If you were to build some platform to intercept and prevent the weight from hitting the floor, you'd lose some gravitational potential energy. The general observation I made was that not many people thought of using paper (myself included) because we had no idea what our state coordinator wanted.

It's amazing how many people used ramp launchers at states.

Were those people tiered?

I'll put it this way. Only 7 out of the 26 teams that competed weren't tiered. 8th place used a ramp and got tiered two. So yeah, quite a bit of building infractions.

It was just as comical as it was heartbreaking to see teams spend minutes trying to "fix" a problem that could never be solved.

nxtscholar wrote:I'll put it this way. Only 7 out of the 26 teams that competed weren't tiered. 8th place used a ramp and got tiered two. So yeah, quite a bit of building infractions.

It was just as comical as it was heartbreaking to see teams spend minutes trying to "fix" a problem that could never be solved.

Wow. That's kinda surprising

Can you describe your launchers?

I used a pulley launcher, 3 pulleys. I mean, to be honest, looking at youtube videos of previous scramblers helped me a lot. You get to see a lot of different designs and take the best features out of each one, and add your own ideas.

wjnewhouse wrote: we were able to get a run time of 1.4 seconds at state

I don't think this time is possible. Because if my math is right that is a speed of 1278mph.

I'm that's definitely some weird math

It's 5.7 m/s, which amounts to 12.8mph

(8m/1.4s = 5.7m/s | 5.7m/s = 12.8mph)