Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-35070608-20190529133839/@comment-27306930-20190531053137

ZunaLegend wrote: lit.

Use LifePos, they're pretty good. (deep breath)  I'm going to be kind tonight. We need to get our battery chemistries straight gents. There are a lot of terms being thrown around, primarily to get you guys to buy certain products. But here's a list of battery types in order of their true performance.

NiCad (Nickel Cadmium) - old school 1.5 volt rechargeable batteries that fade out over a very long lifetime - typically tens of hundreds of recharges. They offer very consistent voltage over a long period, but not much current (aka power).

LiFePo (Lithium FerroPhosphate) - 3.2 volt batteries that are much better than NiCads but have a relatively low energy density, and just tens of hundreds of recharge cycles. They also have low conductivity which is mumbo-jumbo for mediocre performance. They're often called the "poor man's lipo".

IMR (Lithium-ion Manganese or LiMn2O4) - 3.7 volt cells that are much better than LiFePos and provide high drain current for longer periods of time. (aka, more power for longer)  They are superior in almost every way except if they drop below 3.2 volts in which case they have an exothermic runaway chain reation - which means they catch fire and can violently explode ! So look for IMRs with "circuit protection".

LiPo (Lithium Polymer or Lithium-ion Polymer) - ​​​the current state-of-the-art high drain rechargeable battery. These batteries produce more current for more time, more consistently than any other battery chemistry. Unfortunately, they are very limited in the number of times they can be recharged - typically only a few hundred times.

So while LiFePo looks like LiPo, and people bash IMRs, many Nerfers just don't understand the differences between battery chemistries. And with all due respect, many Nerfers simply don't have access to all these battery types, and many can't afford to test and compare every type of battery.