Recently I looked at how discs have changed through time - and how manufacturers have updated their disc technology. It was suggested that I should look at how companies compare in the consistency of their discs.
Looking at disc consistency itself is a bit difficult to do - I don’t have, for example, access to have individual reviews of thousands of individual Innova Destroyers. Instead what we can do is compare manufacturer flight numbers to the number reported by Infinite Discs. On their website, users can give their own flight numbers to a disc and then Infinite posts those aggregated flight numbers to each manufacturer’s page (e.g. See all of Discraft’s discs and see how the flight numbers are not a 1:1 match to Discraft’s own numbers).
Of course, there’s still differences like different plastics, runs, and other sources of variation - but by comparing Infinite’s numbers to manufacturer numbers we can at least ask questions like:
- Which companies have the most predictable flight numbers?
- Which individual discs are most true to their numbers? Which are most divergent?
So, let’s get into it.
Which companies have the most predictable flight numbers?
In the above plot, Innova comes in as having the most accurate flight numbers and Gateway has the least. It’s interesting to note that Gateway and Discmania both have really large error bars - this means that some of their discs are exactly what people expect and some are nothing like what people expected.
Shown above is the “total difference” with no sense of directionality (i.e. we don’t know if people thought these discs were “too fast” for their numbers or “too slow”…we just know if they were as expected or not). For every disc I calculated the difference between each manufacturer flight number and Infinite Disc’s flight numbers and then added up the absolute value of all those differences. Then, the mean value is presented for each manufacturer. For example, an Axiom Envy has a manufacturer’s speed of 3 but Infinite users scored it as 2.7. We repeat that calculation for each flight number and add up all the differences to get a total divergence score.
tl;dr: Discs with high numbers are bad. Discs with low (or zero) are good - exactly as expected by the thrower.
Next, let’s consider some flight numbers with directionality preserved. To save you from chart overload, we will only look at Speed. The other values all sort of correlated as expected from that anyway (i.e. if users thought a disc was faster than its numbers, they also thought it had less turn and more fade).
How do companies compare across their expected speed?
Lastly, here’s a couple tables of discs that are most true (divergence = 0) and some that are least true (divergence score > 2) from their manufacturer flight numbers.
What discs are most true to their numbers?
| Speed | Glide | Turn | Fade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discmania Dd3 | 12 | 5 | -1.0 | 3.0 |
| Discmania Md1 | 4 | 4 | 0.0 | 2.0 |
| Discmania Link | 2 | 3 | 0.0 | 1.0 |
| Discraft Wildcat | 11 | 5 | -2.0 | 3.0 |
| Discraft Talon | 8 | 3 | 1.0 | 3.0 |
| Dynamic Discs Witness | 8 | 6 | -3.0 | 1.0 |
| Dynamic Discs Guard | 2 | 5 | 0.0 | 0.5 |
| Gateway Rage | 10 | 5 | -0.5 | 3.5 |
| Gateway Hybrid | 7 | 4 | -0.5 | 3.0 |
| Innova Destroyer | 12 | 5 | -1.0 | 3.0 |
| Innova Krait | 11 | 5 | -1.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Max | 11 | 3 | 0.0 | 5.0 |
| Innova Cheetah | 6 | 4 | -2.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Gargoyle | 6 | 3 | -1.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Python | 7 | 3 | -1.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Raven | 6 | 4 | -2.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Teebird | 7 | 5 | 0.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Viking | 9 | 4 | -1.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Barracuda | 5 | 4 | -2.0 | 3.0 |
| Innova Bulldog | 4 | 3 | 0.0 | 2.0 |
| Innova Griffin | 5 | 3 | 1.0 | 3.0 |
| Innova Lycan | 4 | 5 | 0.0 | 1.0 |