lipo battery help!

[Shep]

my airsoft gun uses a maximum of a 11.1 v 20 A continuous...what does this mean? am i able to use one that says 11.1 v 20 C or 23 A? or is that too much voltage? im not familiar with the basics of lipo batteries and im looking to buy one, juts dont know what all these 23 A and 20 C mumbo jumbo means. replies would really be appreciated...thanks

[Xephyr]

C is the cell discharge rate. It's (C x mAh)/1000 = total continuous amperage the battery can discharge. (Or C x Ah) If your gun draws 20A continuous, you need a battery that can push at least that much.

If you have a 11.1v 1000mAh 15C battery, the battery can push out 11.1 volts at 15 amps.
A 1500mAh 20C battery will push 30 amps continuous.
A 1200mAh 15C battery will push 18 amps continuous. etc.

If current kind of bogs you down mentally, here's the way my high school teacher described current to me. You have a wheelbarrow and walk it under a giant dirt dispensing machine. You press a button and that machine drops a load of dirt onto your wheelbarrow. You walk the wheelbarrow over to another machine and dump it in. That machine works as long as it is supplied enough continuous dirt. The dirt is voltage. How fast you get it dumped into the other machine is the current.

So in this situation, you have an 11.1v 1500mAh 20C battery. So your machine can take 11.1 volts of dirt (yes. volts of dirt.) that you load up into your wheelbarrow and dump into the machine, thirty times (amps) a second. ((1500mAh * 20C)/1000)

Generally for airsoft, you can't have "too much" capacity or discharge rate (mAh and C). The higher mAh you have, the longer you'll be able to play. The higher voltage you run, the more rounds per second your gun will fire. MOST stock guns can take 8.4v/9.6v NiMH/NiCD and 7.4v/11.1v with no issues.

[darkwolf]