well, the store/wholesaler i work for had me make up a flight ratings chart for all the disc models currently in production.

it is available for download at:
http://www.gottagogottathrow.com/catalog/pdf/JoesFlightChart1.pdf
(you will need adobe acrobat to read/print it)

the ratings are for the disc mold and represent an average across the available plastics.

the system was designed to be simple but descriptive. also this was targeted at the majority of players and people with freakish power will likely have a different view of what stable is.

Range (RNG) 1 to 5: basically, the relative distance a disc can fly (assuming you have enough arm to throw it).

High Speed Stability (HSS) -3 to +2: 0 = stable at high speeds, negative = understable at high speeds, positive = overstable at high speeds.

Low Speed Stability (LSS) 0 to +5: 0 = completely neutral at low speeds with no noticeable gyroscopics.

Power Requirement (PWR) 1 to 5: the approximate distance you should be able to throw in order to be able to consistently make the disc fly with its intended characteristics. failing to meet the power requirement will generally make the disc fly more overstable than intended. e.g. for someone who peaks out at 150', a max weight champ orc will likely fly like a lawn dart.

am looking for comments if anyone has any, although if you don't like something, i would prefer them to be of the "constructive criticism" type vs. nit-picking the values of a specific disc or two.

mmmmmm, universal disc golf chart

Awesome job, but now that it's out there you might have a harder job keeping it up to date! Maybe you could publish this on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_golf) so everyone can add/update as new discs come out.

Great job Blake.
I went through my discs & agree with every rating you gave them.

I really like the power ratings. That will be a great way to know if a disc requires more power than a person has to give. (ex: good for beginners who will shy away from #4 or #5 discs)

Thanks Blake ... you da man.

Awesome job again Blake. I noticed you don't reference glide. Or do you consider that lumped into the range category? I have noticed that glide makes the biggest difference for me when I throw a disc wrong or get less snap. Usually discs with more glide seem to be more forgiving, IMO.

Blake,
Perhaps you should try to copy right that, so that you get credit when other companies start to use it.

Nice job Blake. Can't think of anything it needs. Great way to organize flight characteristics.

thanks for the comments so far.

catchafire: it is to my understanding that they will continue to update it as new products are released. a few discs will be hitting shelves soon that will probably make a revised version by spring. the idea behind the chart was to keep it running and current so that discontinued molds are dropped from the list and new items are added.

accidentalroller: i believe glide is too hard to quantify, especially with the speed of drivers nowadays. first spot of controversy is its definition, e.g. is it the disc's ability to stay in the air as it slows down? is it the tendency for the disc to continue flying on its desired line? is it the period of flight after the disc begins to deccelerate at an increasing rate? etc.

it is also difficult to measure glide across disc types. if you've ever seen a 400' putter throw, first thought is "that putter had a lot of glide", but those throws are also generally quite high... throwing a putter 8' off the ground and it has relatively little glide compared to a driver. there are a few more problems with it that come to mind.

i was hoping that the forgiveness factor would be captured in the power requirement.

hank: i believe they are/have copyrighted it already.

As usual Blake what you said makes perfect sense. I guess the way I define glide is "how long the disc flies without changing directions." I'll give a few examples to explain what I'm talking about.
If you throw a driver (rated at HSS 0, LSS +2) flat and it goes straight for a really long way, then hyzers at the last 10% of its flight, I'd say that the disc has alot of glide.
If you throw a putter (rated at HSS -1, LSS 0) and you hyzer flip it and it goes straight and falls to the ground without hyzering, I'd say it has alot of glide, but not compaired to the driver above.
I guess glide has alot to do with speed too. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong.
But I agree with you, glide is subjective to the disc, the person, the conditions, etc.

fascinating. I was wishing this existed and *POOF* it appeared.

I've been using the Marshall St chart, but it's kind of outdated now.

I don't get the difference between range and power... Is it just that if you have two discs in the same range category that you have to put less effort into a 3 power to get it to go teh same distance as a 5 power disc?

Hey-

The unversal rating chart that Blake T developed will appear in the October/November issue of Disc Golf Magazine. Created by GottaGoGottaThrow, the chart will be updated every two months and appear in each issue for the foreseeable future.

Thanks to Charlie H., Blake T., and everybody that contributed to the development of the chart. We look forward to helping with the distribution of this resource to players throughout the country. We're sending out 15,000 copies of this issue to distributors throughout the country, so there will be plenty to go around. Should be in stores early next week!

Thanks,

-Dave

----------
Disc Golf Magazine
A FREE publication dedicated to promoting the sport of disc golf
www.discgolfmag.com (http://www.discgolfmag.com)

somewhat. power is more static, range is more relative and refers to potential.

someone with power level 3 (225-275') will likely get more distance from a PWR 3 range 5 disc than a PWR 3 range 4, 3, 2, or 1 disc.

the link you may be seeing is that discs requiring less power are generally slower and more understable than discs that are faster and and overstable.

an example is this: i know a lot of very good pros that use the z predator as their workhorse driver. it is not their longest disc, but it is their most consistent disc they can throw "far enough." i also don't know anyone that throws this disc well that has less than 425' of average D. to me this says power requirement of 5. those that throw this disc admit there are many discs they can throw noticeably farther, thus this disc would be power 5 but not range 5.

power requirement was meant to take a lot of things into consideration but was mainly to summarize ease of throwing.

range is basically 5 distance driver, 4 fairway driver, 3.5 tweener driver/midrange discs (cobra, storm, eclipse, etc.), 3 midrange, 2.5 short midrange, 2/1 putt & approach

Great idea! I'm sure all but the really macho will put the chart to good use.

I am curious about one thing. Did you throw all of those discs N amount of times, or are you basing the ratings on existing manufacturer ratings and rankings?

Matt Kelly: I, too, have stared at that Marshall Street chart for extended periods. And yes, there have been a few arguments about some of the ratings. Looking forward to this new model. :cool:

someone with power level 3 (225-275') will likely get more distance from a PWR 3 range 5 disc than a PWR 3 range 4, 3, 2, or 1 disc.



You know, I totally missed that before. I was looking at flight ratings & paid no attention to the RNG rating. Now I know why I like my Sidewinder so much as I definitely have a #3 arm :)

I will have to print out a copy & show my friends. Then they will know why they just can't get their 4 & 5 PWR discs to fly properly :D




Perhaps you should try to copy right that


Although they already answered you can see the (c)Gotta Go Throw Inc. near the bottom.

Great Job Blake.

Ah, makes sense.

Wanted to add my thanks for all the hard work put toward this guide. Great work!

Good job, but does the Orion really have the same flight characteristics as a Valk ?

You may be addicted to disc golf if you "....., too, have stared at that Marshall Street chart for extended periods." I'm also guilty as charged Ptero. :D

Excellent presentation of the data Blake, it's very easy to understand.

I'm Curious how long it took to compile all the results?

I hope you got permission to post this at your own website as well. That's good stuff right there.


i would prefer them to be of the "constructive criticism" type vs. nit-picking the values of a specific disc or two.



Sorry, but I gotta nitpick a specific rating. Cobra is not a 3.5 range flier. Move it to 3 or even 2.5.

absolutely brilliant work ... as always Blake.

Additions:

Breeze is prolly marked as too stable there, I find the breeze to be at least -2 ( in comparison to your other numbers there )

Also, I have an X-Wasp, so you need to add that (it is a limited edition though, so maybe omition is ok). Also, my girlfriend has a Champion stingray, I noticed that that wasn't listed. I'd mark the high speed stability up a little bit on the champ stingray too, she turns a new stratus over much harder than her beat champ stingray in the same weight.

Good job, but does the Orion really have the same flight characteristics as a Valk ?



I think so based on my recently getting used to the Orion. It flies 10-20 feet farther than my Champ Valks and the Valk might be very slightly more stable.

x wasps are/were regular production for a while

back when they were running x-buzzes

only have a few minutes to type right now, will reply to other things later tonight or sometime tomorrow.

pterodactyl: i did about 80 molds from memory and went out to throw the discs i didn't feel i knew well enough or had never thrown. i didn't have a set number of throws used for each trial and it varied a LOT, a few discs took me only about 5 throws while others took me 30+ to get a feel for them with varying degrees of nose down, power, angle, height, etc. as a whole, discs that were slower and older generally took less time than newer fast discs. i'm actually embarassed at how long a few discs took me, but i was quite rusty as this was my first throwing in 3 months and the conditions were less than ideal (on and off rain, quite a bit of wind, etc.)

gnduke: if the scale were expanded from 5 numbers to 10, they would not have turned out the same. i had originally intended not to do any 0.5's, but i only did that when i felt too on the fence about a number. my view of the valk vs. orion is that the valk varies a lot in different plastics and by weight, and thus its number probably doesn't perfectly capture any one version but probably best matches up with a brand new max weight dx valk. there were a lot of diferences that can't be quantified, such as the orion requiring a significant amount of additional nose down than the valk in order to get a flight that would finish nose down as well, likely on the magnitude of 5-10 degrees of mung/pitch. throwing the valk with that additional nose down would make it much flippier, but imo, that is not as ideal for that disc. similarly, the orion was substantially more stable when thrown with less nose down. overall, a lot of these cases became situations where i just had to decide on a value and go with it, or it never would have gotten done.

blacknight: i did the first 80 discs in about 10 minutes. there was more work put into deciding what scale to evaluate them on. the final 60 took a few hours on a few days to go out and throw them. some final tweaks were done when i saw some discs being too similar than i felt they "should" have been.

kclofty: the cobra has more of a driver design (it was a modern driver upon its inception vs. discs that were designed specifically as midrange) than most midranges and is also a bit faster. i will admit it is harder to throw the cobra far for players with bigger power, but with the right line/technique it does have more distance potential than say a shark. if you watch players that the cobra is ideal for, imo, people throwing 175-250' on average, it will outdistance most pure midranges for them.

if you go back in time to when the cobra-type design was more commonplace amongst drivers, a lot of those discs were being thrown 500'+ (stingray, ecilpse, tracer, scorpion, etc.). if memory serves me correctly, i believe the first disc to break 600' was actually a #2 hookshot (then known as a p-38), and i am pretty certain the majority of the discs that are considered staple midrange discs nowadays never really made a run for the record in the post-aviar era.

pat: when i threw the ace race version of the breeze i felt it was a lot flippier... when i took out a new one (i was throwing a brand new max weight) i was surprised that it was holding a line much better than the one i had thrown before. with the negative hss ratings, i tried to reserve 3 for only the flippiest discs (e.g. ones that people out for their first time could turn over), so that compressed the scale a bit and caused somewhat of a log jam in the -2 area. i did find the breeze to be more high speed stable than most of the discs i rated -2, in that i was able to throw the breeze in the 250' range and having it fly dead stable, which is something i could not do with other discs i consider similar in design such as the XD.
i think the thing with the breeze is that it has very little tendency to fade and that happens very late in its flight so that if it turns it will hold that line very easily, but there were a large number of discs i considered easier to turn.

as for the x wasp, it is not currently a standard production model. also, the champ stingray has been discontinued, so it was trimmed from the list. the idea is to hopefully keep that list current with the standard models.


thanks to everyone for the additional comments.

ah yes, i forgot to mention.

a big thanks to gotta go gotta throw and dave at disc golf mag for making this possible to happen.

i had always wanted to finish up a ratings system for all the discs and always said i would have if someone provided the discs for me and it finally happened.

Great job Blake :) and thanks you save me a lot of work ;)!
I have started to work on something like this some time ago, now I can stop :eek:.
I also have all the different plastic and a column for "ageing" or "break-in-time" ;).
I�ll make a link to your chart from our site!

So who is the person who is going to be doing the updates to this chart every 2 weeks are whatever the time period is between updates?

When I try to look at the chart, I get an error from adobe that says file is damaged and cannot be repaired. Afterwards, I could not load the pdga website at all. Do you think the problem is on my side? I'm going to try to reinstall adobe.

jacks: guessing it will be me. if not, it will be someone else :P

hank: guessing the problem is on your side, i just loaded it fine.

I just saw the chart in the latest issue of Disc Golf Magazine, along with another great article by Blake T. Congrats on both.

As with what others have said - Nice work Blake
Finally we have something concise to study & base our decisions on what to try next.
I guess it was for simplicity's sake (and time) that you didn't use the system begun on discgolfreview.

While I could easily nit-pick on some values I realised that some were because of the variation not only becuase of the different plastics, but also due to different molds & runs. (TB/TL is there, but there are others)
Might have to be a 2-3 page version for all of those!

Perhaps adding to the note to cover these differences as well as the plastic is all thats needed.

Could you also have it in alphabetical order too please!

Manufacturer (code/?) might help too.

Wouldn't mind knowing grip/hardness/flex/ etc of plastics as well, perhaps that's another thing to add.

Just a couple of thoughts so far.

Tim.

Thanks to everyone for their comments and suggestions! We are keeping all comments and suggstions on file for future revisions! Keep 'em coming! :)

Could you also have it in alphabetical order too please!
Tim.



I like it in the order it is: Range : High Speed Stability : Low speed Stability : Power requirement. IMHO going alphabetical would take away from its usefulness.

Nothing else to add. I like the Innova ratings, but this seems to be nearly as informative, and a lot simpler.

Blake,
I was going thru your chart (again) in Disc Golf magazine. The details are fascinating when one starts to really compare their own experiences against your numbers.

Great job.

For what it's worth. I have thrown the Ace Race disc several times since our Ace Race. My son and I named it the Martian and here are my version of your numbers.
Range. 5
HSS. Not really sure yet, but I'm leaning on a -1.5.
LSS. Either a 2.5 or a 3.0.
Power. More than likely a 3.0.

My explanation. It is longer than an Eagle. Easier to throw than an Eagle. More overstable than a Sidewinder. Not as overstable as a Orc.