What if the internet goes down?
Nothing happens. The room hub in your ballroom is the source of truth and sits on its own network, so the internet isn't in the path of the show at all. Cloud backup and remote monitoring are extras that can fail without the day noticing.
What if a judge's tablet dies?
Hand them a spare and they tap their own name. It resumes at the routine the room is on, with the scores they'd already submitted intact, and the dead device goes read-only if it ever comes back. Target is under sixty seconds, box to scoring.
What if the hub itself dies?
It reboots by replaying its own log and comes back in the state it died in. Judges keep scoring through the outage on their own devices, and their queued work delivers itself when the hub answers again.
What if we have to go back to paper?
Then you go to paper — it's a written procedure, not an improvisation, and it's rehearsed in the pilot runbook. Because history is append-only, re-entering that block afterwards adds to the record instead of overwriting it, so nothing already captured can be corrupted by the catch-up.
Can we use our own rules and award scale?
Yes, and that's the intended path. Parameters, increments, cutoffs, deductions, buffers, and ceremony order are all versioned config. Nothing about a rubric is compiled into the software.
The escalation ladder, in order: a blip self-heals · a dead device hot-swaps · a dead hub
replays on boot · paper only when digital can't be restored in time.