Spin up Turrets? Continuation

general-discussion
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The continuation of spin up turrets because it is being discussed slightly on the Spin up meta thread.

I guess this is a great opportunity to mention that my turret build is slowing but surely comming along nicely.

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I was gonna make a poll about who agrees with turrets or not but I completely forgot that I don’t have polling perms rn :sob:

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  • Turrets? Agree
  • Turrets? or not

0 voters

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Cata turret when?

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I think to make a turret worth the time and effort of designing, tuning, testing, and revising it instead of using that time for driver practice on a bot with a hard-mounted shooting mech, the turret would have to be able to accurately auto aim at the goal while on the move and have a continuous intaking/indexing mechanism. That is to say the disc goes quickly and smoothly through the intake, indexer, and shooter (likely a flywheel) so you can just drive around intaking discs and they get immediately shot out into the goal. This is extremely hard to do with discs this big (if we had to shoot balls instead this year it would be relatively easier mechanically) but it might still be possible.

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If you don’t have several years of VRC or VEXU related experience you should not be seriously considering any sort of turret mechanism. Yes you can find all sorts of FRC and FTC teams using turrets with launching mechanisms, but they have access to years of experience and a ton of custom machinery. FRC and FTC mechanisms cannot and should not cleanly transfer over to VRC / VEXU designs. Take it from someone who has been involved in VEX for several years and has spent waaay too much time researching and discussing robot design - I have only ever seen two functioning turrets, and one of them barely qualifies. The other team was 185A and you absolutely do not have the time, resources, or design skill to mimic them. (/j, copypasta)

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Agrees with turrets as in turrets being meta, turrets being competitive, or turrets just being possible.

Turrets are definitely possible to do, but I don’t think they will ever be meta because of the complexity. I could see an experienced team being able to make a competitive turret but it’s not easy to do.

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There is a cata turret 3118B I believe.

Edit: i screwd up the number

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I don’t believe that any team that is building a turret is truly trying to be incredibly competitive, but rather they are taking on an awsome building and programing challange, while still being fairly good.

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Accidentally posted this in the spin up meta thread but it probably belongs here

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For some teams trying turrets this may be the case, but I believe that there are probably many teams who might be trying because they believe that they can make a turret competitive. I’m personally considering trying it out as it seems like it could be very powerful if done right, but at the same time I understand the time and energy cost of doing it right is very high.

Though I think it should be noted that I’ve working from a VexU mindset where I can use many more motors than VRC so this may be coloring my opinion on the usefulness of turrets as I can still have 6 motors on the drive while still easily being able to power a turret, and the auton period is 45 seconds long so it is conceivable that the goal could be mostly filled before driver control even starts. For VRC it may very well be the case that having a 6 motor drive is more important than being able to score discs faster as you will be under defense for much more of the match.

I know somewhere I saw a short video of a catapult turret but I’m not sure which team it was so I may have seem their bot. While a well functioning and consistent catapult on a turret is by no means a small achievement and is awesome in it’s own right, I think a flywheel would be a better option for a turret based shooter.

I don’t think I explained my stance on turrets well enough in my previous post on it so I’ll try to put it in a lot more detail in another post in probably an hour or so as it’s taking quite a while to write it out and I want to do it justice, but a quick spoiler is that the discussion that I’ve seen on the potential of turrets in both public and private is missing a huge potential advantage (though to be fair it’s very possible that I just missed it).

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yeah, the advantage of turret is that it can shoot from anywhere within the range and aim automatically, but with cata turret, unlike flywheel, you cannot adjust the power, so the turret would not be very useful.

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adjustable catapult power is possible, but it’s usually just used in match autos.

Turret cata does have an advantage over flywheel in the building aspect though, since it’s a lot easier to load discs into.

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Most people just go to the line and shoot in matches

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hey so did we like decide if turrets are good yet

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There was a turret in the finals of the math division…

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