[Tom Line]

A flywheel will allow for tuning your pid more easily. The increased inertia will help damp acceleration and deceleration.

However, consider it as a physics problem.

From a standstill, you need to spin that flywheel up to a given RPM. The heavier the flywheel, the more work it will take, and the longer it will take.

Once you have fired a ball, a given amount of energy is transferred from the flywheel to the ball. Regardless of whether your shooter slows down a little (heavy shooter) or a lot (light shooter), you'll need to use your motors to add that same amount of energy back into the system. The same amount of energy is removed from both systems, so the motors will have to work just as much in either case to add it back in.

The sum effect is that unless you make your flywheel so heavy that you can shoot without having to spin it back up, a flywheel will only slow down your shooting, due to a longer initial spin up time. It may make it easier to tune a PID to control your shooter. We use 8 inch wheels and have managed to tune a fairly accurate pid (+/- 6% speed).