My oldest pack has 84 flights on it and is still working well although it was probably abused for six flights starting at flight 56 when I installed a DualSky 11T with a higher Kv and then flew it in some 106F weather. After that it tended to swell and get hot after a flight but it goes back to normal after cooling down. A bunch of us are now looking at the internal resistance of each cell to try to determine when to discard or retire our packs. Right now the cells run from 6.8 to 7.5 milliOhms in this pack.

I have a newer 15C pack that has 30 flights and its numbers run from 2.8 to 3.3 milliOhms. For comparison purposes my old TP Prolites run from 6.9 to 8.5 after 200 flights and 6.3 to 7.3 after 140. These packs were also abused during their lifetime.

I'm thinking that numbers over 7 milliohms might be too high for use in competition. Scott Covey and I were trying to get a handle on this and made the assumption that the peak current is 65 volts. If we have an average of 7 instead of 3 we are losing (10x.004)x65=2.6 volts

2.6x65= 169 Watts

169 Watts=.226 HP

It is not as simple as this as everything is varying during a flight but it gives us a feel for what we are losing.

The jury is still out on the TrueRC packs but we reason that if we can get 100 flights out of them they are a good value and it looks like we will. However, I'd wait until I was going to need them as I suspect they degrade sitting on the bench. Anyone have data on that that they'd like to share?

Jim O