Has anyone else had issues with the yellow bars breaking during events? The attached photo was at the end of Qual 4 at the Auwoq event on the weekend. I was concerned that with two broken in such an early match we would have none left by the end.
We ended up repairing one with tape and replacing the other from the practice field. Later in the event another one broke which we also taped. I think the tape added a bit more flexibility during further hits but we did need to keep rotating them between matches to keep them straight at 14 inches from the tiles.
Wow, that’s crazy. Are robots typically slamming into the bars at your event(s)? Did anyone get penalized for field damage? I will definitely say that’s not an expected outcome for the game or field!
Regardless, I wouldn’t have expected that plastic to break like it has. Did it “snap” at those points or did it “bend”? I’m both horrified and curious at the same time!
The robots weren’t slamming into the bars more than you would normally expect (they weren’t taking a run up and trying to smash through or anything) and the refs were not penalising for field damage (our head ref is very good with the details of the rules and was watching carefully).
They were very much breaks and not bends, the bars were still completely round at the point of break and the breaks looked like brittle fractures (and sounded like them when they broke).
One was broken mid-game (the one on the left in the photo), one broke when a robot was climbing nearby (the one on the right in the photo, that broke in two places), and one broke when a robot dropped down after being deenergised at the end of a game.
I don’t think that there was any undue stress on the bars from the field build, we were able to align them by hand without any force when we taped them back together.
