We didn't have a shooter, nor did we prototype one, but judging from the things related here and what I observed and learned from talking to people, the vertical-wheel shooters had a flatter trajectory due to backspin, but also were less "reliable" if the shooter wheel did not have time to build back up to its original speed, because the ball would inherently not have the same amount of backspin. It seemed to me that the bots with very fast and/or heavy shooter wheels (that didn't slow down much when they fired a ball) were the most reliable, accurate shooters. The horizontal shooters did not run into this problem, because they didn't have the backspin factor to play into their trajectory. Like I said, this is just from my own observations, I could be way off of what someone tested and found out.
As for me, if we had tried a shooter, I would have liked to tried a mechanism that put a spiral on the ball, like a bullet fired from a gun. Though I'm not sure how we would have done that...
Anybody got any thoughts on that?
JH