User blog comment:Toon Ganondorf/Rock-Paper-Scissors/@comment-6023653-20170208180145

I kind of agree, but I'm still firmly of the opinion that you can't take this as a 'this weapon beats that one' thing, it always has to be taken as a case-by-case basis. The whole 'maximise the time opponents have to cause damage' thing doesn't really work, if a robot's on the wedge then 95% of the time the disc is in such an orientation that it can't make contact. Most of your examples are, on the whole, mediocre front-hinged flippers suffering from other flaws: V-Max was poorly controlled (although it did get one decent drive in underneath, if it was better controlled and managed more of them it may have posed more of a threat); Spirit of Knightmare was pretty slow and not very nimble, and seemed to take a lot of weight away from the flipper to other less effective weapons (but even so had the better of Disc-O in the earlier rounds); Flepser had the steepest wedge I've ever seen short of a vertical surface AND was slow; Interstellar beat a horizontal spinner anyway; and Purple Predator's got a colossal ground clearance and was never going to get a flip in anyway. Weld-Dor I'll give you, but Little Fly's a different class of weapon anyway! Firestorm did conk out against Hypno-Disc, but seeing as that's the one and only time it ever broke down and dominated the 3rd place battle (even without a flipper, I might add), I think that's a fluke. In fact, when GOOD front-hinged flippers (i.e. Firestorm) faced GOOD horizontal spinners (13 Black, Wild Thing, Hypno-Disc) it tended to come out on top.

This is getting ridiculously long but my point is this: most of the time, it's not solely the weapon type that decides the battle. There's other things to be taken into consideration- there's the rest of the design (bodyshape, motors etc.), there's the ability of the driver, and so on. I'd argue fast, manoeuvrable, well-driven front-hinged flippers tend to win, and slow/badly-driven ones don't.