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Aaron, your arguement is massively oversimplified, annoyingly patronising and verging on being willfully elitist as per usual.

The point with batteries is that unlike armour or motors which have a direct and easily quantifiable effect upon a design, the fact that these fights are written makes a battery stat just a vague and unecessary complication. How long is a written fight? The writer may say its 3 minutes but as you yourself profess vapour fights frequently dont even resemble actual fights anyway and are by no means half as busy as them most of the time, so how can we expect writers to have an accurate guage of time, if anything what we need to devise is a way of standardising how writers percieve time, but of course as there is no way that could ever be done, its just asking for bad writing to enact something which depends on time as a factor, its not like Im saying dont ever include batteries, or even dont allow for batteries in the weight, which Im in fact for.

You always kick off with the personal attacks dont you Alex...

You reckon that batteries dont bring any effect to the battle like armor or motors. The big deal is, motors are dependant on batteries for their performance! You can get away with a LEM130 @ 24v on two packs of nicds, but you will easily degrade the motor down to 50% of its possible performance.

Robot A runs 2 LEM130s with 4packs, sacrifices some armor to get the full power of the motors. Robot B runs 2 LEM130s, with 2 packs and runs heavier armour. The writer just blindly looks at the LEM130 in the stats, goes off a figure that they will both product the same push, but Bot A loses cause it has thinner armor... Makes a big difference. Another can of worms is gearing, gearing can make a big difference in performance.

In the end, we all need to come to a comprimisation, I feel we could work towards something like a chart that shows batteries, voltage, weight and capacities. A similar chart for motors, stating voltage, power input, power output and weight. Simply select your motors from the motor chart, look at the power rating and then select some batteries from the battery charge that match those requirements.

In the end, I believe with some accurate stats across the board, the writer can look at stats and go This bot will be able to out push that bot, since in the stats I can see this one is geared a more for torque instead of speed, This bots weapon has more power then that ones and then throw in an unpredictable element called luck and produce a nice battle, were everyone started off on a level playing field. This also gives the writer an accurate backing behind their battles, weve had disputes with battles before, and rewrites because of it.

As a conceptualist, your too caught up in the glossy picture you drew, instead of thinking about if it will actually work.