Air Trajectory B/C

[bernard]

[Krish2007]

A lot of people seem to not know about this, but Science Olympiad will often post FAQs about unclear parts of the rules. In Air Trajectory this year, this FAQ states that manually supporting the weight with a string or other form of cable is not a valid trigger device. This means that if you let go of your string, and the weight falls (i.e. you are the only thing holding up the weight), then you do not have a legal trigger device. I interpret this as a violation of rule 3.f. (the rules for a trigger device), which is a construction violation and results in a tier. When I ran this event at my school's invitational a week ago, I erroneously claimed that this system violates the first part of 3.f. ("activating [the trigger device] must not contribute significant energy to the launch"), but reading the FAQ more closely, I think that it's actually a violation of the last part ("The triggering device must not pose a danger"). I've seen so many teams get tiered because of this, so I figured that I should probably make a post about this and the FAQs in general. It's so important to read them, especially in build events, because of clarifications like this, which are not immediately obvious but can result in serious penalties.
(If it seems familiar, this post is a repeat of one I made last week that got deleted when the website went down)