Originally posted by wcoyote
The length of the wire does matter in the fact that the longer the wire, the more voltage drop you have because of the resistance of the wire itself.
While that's true, with the gauge of wire used in RC and the average lengths encountered, the resistance of the wire is swamped by both the ESC inefficiency and armature resistance, as well as being practically nonexistant in terms of total I^2 R losses. We're talking about less than 10V, across a few thousandths of an ohm here. A few inches either way means, quite literally, nothing.
You're right about the soldering tho. I've been smacking people upside the head with that here for a few months now. A bad solder joint will be several orders of magnitude worse in terms of losses than a few inches of 14AWG.
And before someone jumps on me about ESC 'resistance', ESC manufacturers worry about low ESC theoretical FET resistances because of heat, not efficiency. Ever notice how a lot of the new ESCs don't need the big honkin' heatsinks that our Novak T4s did?
-dave