Well, to get a few questions on the board first. Did the receiver/servos function after the melt down with the esc plugged into the battery? What size motor did you have? You don't mention if you had soldered any capacitors on the motor, there are normally 3 capacitors. One soldered on each motor terminal and then to the motor case ground and a third soldered across the two motor terminals to surpress RF noise from brush arcing. My first guess would be that you had a short to ground in your wiring to the motor. Maybe a bit of solder bridged over to the motor case? Not having the Schottky diode in place shouldn't cause your problem (unless you had soldered it in backwards). The Schottky will make the ESC run a little cooler and make the motor run a little better. This would have been a good reason to have a fuse in the positive lead to the motor (hind sight). In your case a 20 amp fuse like the little plug-in fuses for your car that would be soldered in-line. The ESC you have is supposed to be able to handle up to 10 cells so excess voltage wouldn't have been the problem. Another possibility might be a defective motor that was shorted. You might try hooking up a couple 1.5 v C or D batteries and test the motor by itself. As far as plugging in the ESC, it would be plugged into whatever channel your throttle is on and that in itself should not cause the ESC failure. As you indicated the wiring on the ESC's is pretty straight forward and (not knowing Dymond ESC's) most ESC wires are clearly marked as to what they should be hooked up to. Again, my best guess is you have (had) a short circuit somewhere between the ESC and the motor and caused a large amperage draw through the ESC.