The agendas are long and time short, so there's seldom much spare time for long discussions. That's why it's so important to have the proposals complete with all technicalities. And rather have different ones so it's a matter of picking the preferred one.
I've tried to contact FlightPower in order to get a statement from them (no one present right now). I'm quite certain that at this point in time it's not technically possible to make saddles any shorter. I'll be back once I get in touch with them.
A NiMH cell is 23mm thick. 3x that is 69mm.
Trakpower saddles are:
4800 mAh: 71mm
3200 mAh: 70mm
You can as I've pointed out make narrower packs, but then you'll have to use less capacity cells. Which then in turn would have to bee stacked on top (coupled in parallel) = too high. So in order to make a legal one now it would be of very low capacity. Hence not very interesting for most racers.
I've once opened up a flight pack. The "ears" for soldering are VERY small & thin, so there's really nothing you can do to reduce the size. The only thing would be to drop the hard casing, but that would be dangerous.
We can of course sit on our hands and wait for #2 generation LiPo batteries... But we have these now, and they work great! Let's stop fiddling around and get racing with them!
