Dark Sabre wrote:fleet130 might be able to tell you more about what the event was like during its previous stints
Unfortunately, someone convinced me to throw away my old rulebooks, so I can't say exactly what the rules were before 1994.
When I mention reasons for changes, it’s important to understand that 10 people could have 10 different reasons for supporting a change. They each walk out thinking the change was solely for their reason!
Mousetrap Vehicle was originally based solely on the distance traveled. The vehicle that traveled farthest won. After a few years it became impossible to find a venue large enough to accommodate the vehicles. The last year under this scoring, our school's team had a vehicle that could travel 4 times the length of a full sized gym.
Sometime in the early 90s, a target distance and predicted time were added. The target distance was originally fixed at 20 meters and the contestants were to predict the time it would take the vehicle to travel an intermediate distance, which was unknown beforehand. Scoring for both time and distance were simply target value minus the error.
Tournament organizers began complaining they had a hard time coming up sites that could accommodate a 20 meter track, so the distance was gradually shortened to 10 meters.
With a fixed known distance, it wasn't long before scores were closely grouped at the top. To spread them out, the unknown target distance was added. This had an added advantage in that it could also be used for the intermediate timed distance.
Along with these changes, the percentage of correctness scoring was added. Originally, both time and distance were worth 100 pts. i.e.
[(target-error)/target]*100 This made it possible to have the same maximum score regardless of the target distance/time. Later, the time score multiplier was changed to 50 to reduce the weight of the time score.
I toyed with the concept of Out & Back prior to the 2000 National Tournament at Eastern Washington University. I was never able to come up with a satisfactory (to me) method of determining the vehicle performed the "out" portion accurately. I mentioned the idea to a few people, but eventually abandoned it. Meanwhile someone else came up with the idea independently and has been working to get it accepted.
Exactly what the new event will consist of is impossible to predict. It could be any combination of past events or something entirely new. Until the task is known, it’s difficult to guess how it might be scored.
. fleet130 might be able to tell you more about what the event was like during its previous stints, but I can't.