I also have a basic corona battery question and thought i'd ask it here before making a separate post for something so closely related....

I've been looking into lipo packs, because my trainer (who is a nitro heli guy) scoffed a bit when I told him I had an electric, said I should get as much flight time in batteries as i can afford ... so i thought "well, I'll show him"

The lithium-polymer pack that I was looking at was the 2600mAh/7.4V one made by iRate on CBP, selling for $50. It weighs 3.5 oz ... which is a bit more than half of what some of the big 8-cell NiCad packs weigh, so I was thinking, is it possible to wire 2 in parallel and then have a 5200mAh/7.4V, 7.0 oz pack? That would be the voltage equivalent of a 6-cell NiCad -- I'm hearing that may be too low for fun flying, but would it be okay for learning hovering and forward flight?

Only thing I'm not sure about is whether it's safe to discharge two lipo packs in parallel like that. The problem might be, and I've seen this with other batteries, if one has a higher internal resistance than the other, they will discharge unevenly and you'll end up with one battery deep-discharged by the time you run the pair out to a "low" voltage. Also, they if they get uneven, the higher one can try to charge the lower one. Both scenarios would be bad (and expensive) given the cost of the batteries. I think it would be possible to protect them with diodes (zeners was my first thought) in series with the packs, that would cut them off at a certain voltage and keep them from charging while in the heli ... but I'm sure somebody has probably thought of this before though, and made some sort of cute device that does this all automatically.

Just throwing this out there. Any immediate thoughts?