Hi, I am a IQ competitor and would like to now if I should use a fly wheel our a catapult. I have read that catapults are more consistent, but from the tournaments I have gone to the high scorers are the fly wheels. I f you have any ideas please share soon.
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Welcome! If you want a high scoring robot, use a catapult with a roller in the back, flywheel will get you some design awards, but aren’t as efficient as the back roller. So in conclusion, flywheels are good in teamwork/design, but modded catapults are more better at scoring.
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Thanks I might try this for my robot, I have tried a catapult and flywheel alone but never as one. If you could add a little more detail that would be appreciated.
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so catapult will proved more consistency. you can tune your catapult to shoot 2 goals at 1 time witch is good for skills or 1 ball at a time. if you get your catapult to shoot high goal then I would suggest putting a roller like people use for their intake on the back to roll the ball into the low goal. while a fly wheel is quick it can have times where the wheels don’t spin a the same speed the whole game so this can make it difficult to have a good skills run. it just depends on what you want your roots strength to be. let me know more details for a more detailed answer 
What I did to find the back roller is I looked up back roller vex iq rapid relay on YouTube. Here is a video of what it looks like in action.
This robot has pneumatics, but it doesn’t require it. It uses the roller in the back to put the ball in the low goal, and the launcher in the middle to get to the high goal.
If you want a 4 motor drivetrain to make it competitive, pnuematics is necessary.