> That said, I'd be interested in lifespan. Yep. I used to fly electric rc planes back when NiCads were the best battery available. Most of the cells we used w

> That said, I'd be interested in lifespan. Yep. I used to fly electric rc planes back when NiCads were the best battery available. Most of the cells we used were rated for a 0.1C charge and a 14 hour recharge at that rate. If you bought the right brand and model cells, it was possible to recharge them at 10C and fully charge them from total empty in just over 8 minutes. (Usually about 7 minutes with the low voltage cutoff in the speed controllers I used.) You'd get noticeable degradation in a pack after 50 or so cycles, and some would become unusable at 100 cycles. (Which was a decent tradeoff, since a catastrophic battery destroying crash was reasonably likely to occur well within 100 flights, at least with the sort of plane and flying me and my friends engaged in...) For a while I was flying 7 cell Sanyo AR 500mAhr packs and since I owned 3 of them I'd charge them at about 14C (7A, the highest my charger would go) which would let me relaunch every 5 mins (I'd get maybe 3.5mins of mostly full power flying time from a pack, so I'd basically fly until I got bored of landing/swapping-batteries/relaunching, or I'd crashed and broken it again.) Kids these days with their LiPo packs and brushless motors don't know how good they have it <shakes fist at cloud>