Having investigated some of these questions with respect to quadcopters and micro-mouse 'bots, the power density (both in mass and volume) of capacitors is pret

Having investigated some of these questions with respect to quadcopters and micro-mouse 'bots, the power density (both in mass and volume) of capacitors is pretty terrible. Whether you're talking about aluminum electrolytic traditional capacitors or double-layer supercapacitors, they're inferior in most cases to a lipo. That's especially true if you're open to high-discharge 50C or 75C lipos, which can dump their entire energy capacity in ~60 seconds. If you only need a few milliseconds of 'zap', yeah, a capacitor bank is great. It's the only option if you need to do that more than a couple hundred times in the life of the battery; a chemical battery will wear out but a capacitor can last for millions or billions of charge/discharge cycles. But even a time as short as 1.461 seconds is probably on the far side of the inflection point where capacitors make sense. If you like, run through the options on Digikey: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/electric-double-layer-capacitors-edlc-supercapacitors/61 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/electric-double-l... ex: https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/electronic-components/resources/data-sheet/eaton-xv%20supercapacitor-cylindrical-snap-in-data-sheet.pdf https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/electronic-... Also remember that an ultracapacitor is about as far in behavior from a physicist's ideal plate capacitor as you can get - they're not linear, they have highly significant internal series resistance...