Quote Originally Posted by Skygeezer View Post
For sure about the dollar sig

ns. But there are things to know. I read in MAAC magazine about the demise of the big electric Lancaster, built from Tony Bingelis plans. It suddenly lost all power and crashed. The builder thinks there was insufficient redundancy in the electric system so one failure took it all down. High power multi-engine installations require different distribution and wiring. How do you use multiple batteries in both parallel and series? How do you talk to the receiver with 4 ESC's? What sorts of connection busses would you use and where do you get them? There is a lot to know, and I would like to learn.
Well... learn from that for a start. I'd never build a large 4 motor plane that relied on a single central pack... that would cause nightmares just trying to protect your ESCs from ripple currents alone.

I've learned first hand that large BEC's, even the expensive "bullet proof" variety, don't like being paralleled through a bat-share. You won't find many people flying large electrics that don't run independent receiver electrical, same as gas, with the aim of making sure that exactly that kind of problem never eliminates the possibility of at least a "deadstick" landing.

Sounds to me like what you want to learn won't be found in a single book, especially one aimed at the RC hobbyist, there's a great thread on RCGroups with a goldmine of firsthand experience with very large single motor planes.

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1142000

But in terms of a large multi-motor... I wouldn't worry about power busses because I'd only run independent systems for each motor and control system.