Rear-hinged flippers

"In arenas where it's possible to win by throwing an opponent out of the arena, a monster flipper is a viable design choice"

- Aaron Joerger

Rear-hinged flippers were the more common of the two types of true flipper. They first came into existence when Chaos 2 stormed through Series 3, becoming Grand Champion. Before that all rear-hinged weapons, limited as they were, were lifters. The other innovator, although not as successful, was Facet.

As the series progressed, flippers became more powerful, easily able to toss house robots over and throw other competitors out of the arena. The most notable robot with a rear-hinged flipper is Chaos 2, also the first robot to throw another out of the arena, but as the series progressed, other more powerful robots such as Wheely Big Cheese, Gravity, Spawn Again and Dantomkia also came into the spotlight.

Definition

 * A true flipper is defined as a reasonably wide flipping plate.
 * The weapon is considered rear-hinged because the hinges are at the top of the robot (usually top of a wedge). When the robot fires its flipper, it gives the impression that a robot is opening its "mouth".

Strengths & Weaknesses
The strengths of rear-hinged flippers were that they could easily end a battle quickly by throwing a robot onto its back or out of the arena. They could sometimes double as a self-righting mechanism, depending on the design.

However, flippers were fragile, and could be broken, most often by heavy bladed axes, sharp spiked axes or vertical crushers. Also, CO2 powered flippers only had a limited supply of flips. Flippers rarely offered damage potential and their effectiveness was decreased when Self-righting mechanisms and invertible robots became more popular.

List of Robots with Rear-Hinged Flippers
Robots are listed alphabetically. Robots that are not heavyweight are listed with a green background.