Another question that presentet itself when doodling: what the best way to wire a five engined (speed 400) plane?

From : Don Stackhouse

That depends on the plane and what setup you want to use. If you run them in series, you will need a lot of voltage and low current, so you'll end up with lots of small cells. Also, if one motor fails open-circuit, you will lose power to all of them.

For a parallel setup, you need much less voltage but gobs of current. This results in a small number of fairly large cells.

In general my own experience suggests that the parallel setup generally works better, at least on these smaller models where the current per motor is fairly low. On something larger with a lot more amps per motor, it may make more sense to use series wiring.

From a safety standpoint, if your plane is likely to become uncontrollable from the asymmetric thrust if one motor quits, then series wiring may make sense. If one motor quits, they all quit, and the plane remains controllable. However, if you deigned your control surfaces correctly, you should be able to maintain control with one or two (or more) motors dead and windmilling. In that case the parallel wiring might be safer, because it would allow you to fly safely to a good runway, instead of having to make an immediate forced landing at whatever inhospitable place you happen to be flying over at the time.

Don Stackhouse
DJ Aerotech