[Tom Line]

The short version:

If you look at a wheeled shooter as a simple ideal system, the only things that really come into play are:

1. Shooter moment of inertia.
2. Normal force on the ball.
3. Shooter wrap.

The first matters because the ball is generally in contact with the wheels for such a short period that the motor and control system really can't react to it. By the time your system sees a decrease in velocity and tries to account for it by increasing motor power, the ball is gone. That's why some teams use heavy shooter wheels or add flywheels.

The second item matters because the only thing that moves the ball is the wheel-to-ball friction. As the balls get more used, they become much softer. This decreases normal force on the ball, and decreases the friction force that moves the ball. You need to have enough force on the ball that the ball surface speed matches the wheel speed before it leaves the shooter. I.e. - wheel slip on the ball is bad because it will result in inconsistent distances. This was an important lesson that came out of 2012.

Shooter wrap matters because the longer the ball is in contact with the wheels, the more time it has to accelerate to the same speed as the wheels. 60 degrees versus 120 degrees may not seem like much visibly, but it is substantially more time that the wheels have to accelerate the ball so they arrive at the same speed. This was a lesson we learned from 2013. In-line small wheel shooters needed multiple wheels to match what a wrap-around single wheel shooter could do. This was actually a combination of all 3 of the issues listed above, but testing proved that wrap greatly helped on the slippery frisbee surface.

Use your old ball, and tune your shooter. Then put a new ball through it. The new ball will fly much further because it will be less squishy and have more normal force (more friction). Start increasing your compression. Eventually you will reach the cross-over point where the two are shooting the same.

Of course - there are a couple additional points. It takes some brute force to do this. Either a high initial RPM, a flywheel, shooter power, or all three. Consistently introducing the ball to the shooter in the same place each time is important.