Yeah we will have to live with legal racing battery prices, nothing we can do about that. At least it is still cheaper than the bad old Nickel days.
By 'equivalent', I mean spec equivalence - voltage and capacity. I never pay attention to C ratings as in my experience they have been generally BS. I've got 25C packs with lower IR than 35C packs, for example. Then again if you discharge any 50C pack at 50C continuous, the pack will not survive - whoever made it.
In the case of hard cased packs having uncased equivalents, many times it turns out the cells are not actually the same. Not sure about Orion, but once the cells are encased in hard plastic who is to tell what the manufacturer of them is? An extreme example was a guy at our club who bought a 2S LiPo pack which wasn't performing well from new. He split the case apart only to find a rack of 6 low-budget 2/3A NiMhs! Quite funny and not that relevant, but you get my point.
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