What did you expect? 
I'm no JimmyFingers... 
Hah! My ears are burning and now I'm curious though about the winky face 
It's been mentioned a little bit throughout the various VP10 threads but the main culprit for the "grab and go" or "stop dead in your tracks" ball and flipper interaction via the in-lane is a friction issue between how it's set on the collidable in-lane objects and the flipper itself. Most flipper settings have had the friction up between .6 and .8 which helps it grip and allow for some straighter shots when the ball has some speed through the in-lane and you will see slightly better back-hand angles too. It is still good to have rubbers and flipper friction settings at least around .5 but that does still depend a little on what the table is at and people seem to be going with the lower than what was originally specified table friction values of .08. - 1.
The tables that show the most problem around the flippers will have low to extremely low friction on the in-lane collidable objects (and sometimes 0, which should never be the setting for friction on any element in VP as it's counter-intuitive to the real world physics we're trying to model plus VP seems to do some extra strange things when friction is set at an absolute 0). Why this happens is that if the collidable left or right in-lane wall is only at say 0 or .0015 or other settings that are left overs from VP9, it's essentially having no effect on the ball and when the ball comes through the in-lanes with some significant spin, resting and rolling on the in-lane does absolutely nothing to dissipate and manipulate the spin to what should be the direction of the ball roll (at least after a certain amount of time of contact). So what ends up happening is that a ball with lot's of back spin coming through the in-lanes in this low friction scenario keeps all of it's back spin, hits the much higher friction rubber / flipper and jumps back or stops (some of this effect can and does happen in real machines and I had it happen to me this weekend several times). The other effect is a ball with lot's of forward spin, again keeps the forward spin, hits the high friction flipper, and "bites" / "digs" in and grabs the surface via the spin to produce more rolling speed, so flies over top of the flipper.
In PMv5 everthing except for flippers was set at .3 for friction (hardcoded) so that the scenarios and difficulty / time consumption of creating and converting VP9 tables would not need to be undertaken. Now that it's not hardcoded, a lot of these settings are being overlooked and weird collisions / interactions occurring. A metal in-lane object should be fine enough at about .15 give or take a bit to largely get rid of the exaggerated effects described, combined with a flipper having a friction from around .6 or so and is still a recommended setting range.
Things work without any issue around that area in the latest VP10 Star Trek table because the in-lane is at .3 friction (a safe setting in a way that it mirrors exactly what PMv5 set for everything) but also has a lower than what really should be setting for the flipper at .25, making the two so similar that no interaction difference occurs between the two mediums. A metal in-lane most definitely has less friction than the rubber of a flipper, however, because of the aspects described above, even if equal to the flipper won't produce any of the effects that could start to get to the more unrealistic levels of "grab and go" or "stop dead in your tracks". But, keeping the frictions for the two types of materials basically the same, is not going to accurately model the real world behaviour. Most of the undesirable results have come from the friction not being correctly set at all on the in-lanes (large discrepancies with the flippers), as I say keeping values from VP9 without being modified and those were set in thousandths of units (i.e. typically around .0015 to .0040). So that is the main culprit of all of this situation on other tables and to get a more decent balance of the legitimate situation of these behaviours but not overkill, reasonable starting point settings are around .125 to .2 for metal / plastic inlanes and about .5 to .8 for flipper friction both depending somewhat on the table friction.
It is true that a .3 friction for everything would seemingly be "safe" and a first step for a VP10 table in being that it is the same as PMv5 was, however, it's not taking advantage of the full way the physics interactions of various objects and the pinball should behave in the spirit of mimicking real life. Even in PMv5 days, flippers were set higher in friction because - well because it was modifiable for starters - but also as the rubber on them would be one of the highest friction items on the entire table next to other rubber objects. They were routinely at .6-.8 without getting these "grab and go" or "stop dead in your tracks" (because of the forced .3 on any in-lane objects / walls) so it's not really a fault of the flipper friction and if you're too low you are going to sacrifice some other aspects about ball angles / straight shots when the pinball has some speed.
My suggestion is stick within the recommended ranges I put forth and you'll get the best of both worlds.
Edited by jimmyfingers, 25 June 2015 - 08:27 PM.
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