Agreed Dick, the only thing you have to watch out for is in the application of the knowledge to the big ones. The light foamys can give a new comer a false sense of security.

I still like throttle for a name, rheostat reminds me of the big foot diameter things we had in EE power labs. It brought up a memory. We had a DC power lab at Purdue where you used these big 1930's (if not older) equipment and connected them with big cables and the like and measured stuff with monster meters. It was all fun but I was the only guy in the lab group who had ever handled circuity, I had been a ham since 8 years old (child prodigy - what happened to such a promising start :-(

Anyway we needed a lower voltage than was available out ot the patch panel. I asked the grad student instructor what could we use? He pointed to this big something on wheels and said to hook it into the line and it would give up variable voltage. OK I said and hooked it up. When your circuit was ready you went over to a wall sized panel and used big power plugs to tap into the voltage available.

So I checked it over, went to the board and started to plug in the plug. ZZZZaaaaPPPP, flames and arcs and there was a big black smear where the plug almost welded itself to the panel. Luckily I yanked it back (I had made lots of zaps as a kid but on a smaller scale).

The instructor came running over looking all flustered and looked things over and said woops, sorry about that, the variable voltage thing was AC. It was a direct short across the DC voltage instead of being a variable inductance on AC.

A rheostat would have been a better choice.

But I still like throttle, or speed control. You have a speed control, you open up the throttle.

My latest airplane a P-51 is around a 800 watt system. Insert a Tim the tool man Taylor grunt here. The electric stuff is fun and a lot lighter. Batteries at $150 a small bundle sure need to come down in price though.