[Ianworld]

I know one reason some engineers might think that the batteries weren't capable of supporting the current draw of a first robot. A battery of the form factor that FIRST uses cannot put out the amperage that the FIRST robots use. While robots have a 120 amp breaker they will often draw in excess of(i'm guessing here based on how often my team's robot stalls out) 200 to 300 amps for short periods of time. I checked the battery spec sheets a while ago and they were labeled by exide as being a special type of "Deep Discharge" battery. That basically meant that they were able to under heavy loads be able to output more amps than a regularly configured battery. I can't rememeber what the written max load was, I think it was around 240 amps, but I am not sure. The batteries as other people have stated have quite a bit varience between them so I'm sure that some of the batteries can put out 300 amps easily with less resistance(and thus for longer periods of time) than other batteries. Anyhow my 2 cents.