The event itself. As always, a great time hosted by the BBB folks. 3 guaranteed fights with the first one being a 3-way fight.
Fight 1 was against Stingray, a 4WD undercutter, and P.I.T.A, a 2WD vert (check out their build log here). I was generally happy with this fight, as the flipper actually got to do its thing! I got one or two bigger flips and a handful of smaller ones. Despite the reset cycle programmed into the weapon, I found it didn’t reset all that reliably, and a few occasions where it seemed to trigger on impacts - I suspect impacts in the arena caused the clutch to partially close (it’s held open with springs), causing a bit of engagement with the flywheel. Stingray got stuck under the pit button about halfway through the fight, and not long after, DesktopLauncher stopped moving. It revived itself briefly before getting counted out, but shut down again, leading to P.I.T.A. getting the win with a few seconds left on the clock.
What followed was a huge repair job. I had to completely disassemble the flywheel module and realised that the wind plate had ripped itself out of the clutch, failing along layer lines. Lacking a spare clutch, the bodge fix was to drill out the existing holes so I could run longer screws through the remaining material, hoping it would survive the rest of the day (along with copious amounts of superglue).
Fight 2 was against another unique flipper, Moonshot, a compressor pneumatic flipper. Before the fight had event begun, I had lost one side of drive (this turned out to be an unplugged phase wire, I’m presuming I forgot to plug it in in my haste to get the bot ready for the fight!).Being unable to drive properly, I could not get the flipper into position to flip Moonshot, then the working drive side decided to grenade itself, leading to a K.O.
Luckily, I had a spare drive pod ready to swap in, so the turnaround this time was quick (my second fight had been swapped with Moonshot’s 3rd, due to how long it took for the repair, sorry!). Fight 3 was against Dark Eclipsor, a lifter/spinner a la Whiplash. Unfortunately, it was having issues after some big damage in its previous fights. The flipper in this fight was pretty weak for some reason, but I was vaguely more mobile, so managed to push around Dark Eclipsor for a bit before hitting the pit button, at which point DesktopLauncher stopped moving. Luckily, it came back, and I managed to push Dark Eclipsor into the pit.
So, good things - the flipper worked, at least in the first fight. While the drive was happy, it was moving quickly with a decent amount of pushing power. Things to improve - weapon reliability, drive reliability… wait that’s just the whole bot 
To expand a bit - the drive cutting out I’m pretty sure was due to thermal shutdown of the repeat DESC - the drive motors were VERY hot coming out of fights, to the point where I thought I had blistered my thumb when I brushed up against one retrieving it after a fight (luckily that didn’t happen). I think this is due to the change from a 3:1 to a 3:2 reduction meaning the motors were being pushed a lot harder. The plan for a future version is to move to a single cam design - this cuts the amount of bearings in each side and also lets the chassis hopefully become smaller due to the smaller drive pods. Also moving back to a higher reduction so the motors aren’t being pushed as hard.
For weapon module, I want to redesign it so it is a lower profile, and to change the clutch engagement so the motor is closing the clutch rather than the other way round, to avoid needing the programmed workaround. I did notice recently that Broken Link Robotics’ Loft, a 30lb flywheel flipper, recently showed off a reworked flywheel design with a horizontal flywheel setup, so I might try exploring something like that.