I spent 7 intense years designing and developing brushless systems and batteries and going to Chinese factories. Im burned out on electrics to be honest. I really like the new smaller gas engines that have come out on the scene the last couple years. I dropped out of using the larger power systems because of maintaining battery packs and reliability issues in ESC's for the most part. So glad I never paid for them as we used a lot of packs up thru hard testing and destructive testing. The most reliable component out of the three used in a brushless system tends to be the motor. Then the battery packs if used within their range are very reliable, less than 1% defect rate in production. The ESC's... not so much. Remember Castles debacle a few years ago with exploding capacitors? Even they have problems keeping things together from time to time.
When it comes to ESC's you have to spend the money if you want performance and more reliability. Theres a threshold I believe that once you get past a certain amount of power like around 2.5KW you really have to watch what you do. Ive run up to 7KW systems in boats which are unforgiving applications and it gets real intense. Ive had several ESC's explode in testing and catch fire.
Ive seen more regular production ESC's of all kinds have more failures than any other component and from multiple companies. Its a very technically challenging component. The saying buy nice or buy twice to so true about ESC's. In this case nice is like Castle's upper end line and Jeti, Komtronics and a couple other European brands. Your going to drop a few hundred dollars on an ESC theres just no doubt about it and thats just to fly nice planes over 18lbs with great performance and especially EDF. All that being said a guy could screw up even the best ESC with a poor installation, wrong prop, or just improper usage. Theres no guarantee. So I didnt see the benefits only the costs and risks associated with high power EDF and I went ahead and got my turbine waiver.
I still remember a lot of the info on this stuff but I don't really practice it anymore. Im back to the really small stuff and some EDF and thats about it in brushless for now. I think its more practical and cheaper to run gas engines and turbines than to manage a bunch of different size LiPo packs all year round trying to protect and prolong your investment in batteries.
Sooo... How does all of this relate back to P-38's? Simple, take my advice and burn fuel! Lol, its so much better these days with small gas engines, cheaper, clean, sounds good, great power, light weight, reliable... What more do you want? Just remember buy nice or buy twice, it works the same in engines too!