There was a time when someone was talking about having a vertical flywheel which would hook onto an axe, thus providing the axe with a lot of kinetic energy. Did this ever get built? Another related idea which Ive not seen implemented is to spin up an internal flywheel and hook onto an external disk/bar once up to speed - which means youre not quite so constrained when shoved against a wall (see Hypno-disk vs Tornado). You could do a CO2-less flipper the same way, possibly with a Cassius III-style (when it was still going to have it) vertical flywheel at the back as an exposed weapon as well, although the engineering would be... challenging.

Ive often wondered about the idea of two counterrotating flywheels mounted above each other on a common axis, thus avoiding torque steer. The effect would be to chew into a relatively limited area on the opponent rather than to throw panels off, but it would stop the robot with the disks being thrown around the arena so much (although of course it puts more pressure on the axle). Is this a bad idea? Not that, for the same philosophical reasons as Mario, Im ever likely to build a spinner...

If youre talking about maintaining the KE in the flywheel for the whole fight (not powering it from batteries or similar) then I think thats more of a challenge; the buffering needed to survive the various forces to which the robot would be subjected would make it very difficult to do anything useful, and youd need a *lot* of energy to be up there with the amount stored in CO2, petrol or even batteries.

Just my tuppence.

--
Fluppet