I hope that a few people understand my intentions with this post. i chose to put it in its own thread so that people can feel free to disagree without the fear of me turning it into a contest. I’ll also do my best to help anecdotal understandings and comparisons but its much easier to share as a community if you are coming from a position that you and anyone in the thread could be wrong and its ok to learn.
Power in high performance electronics (batteries, motors, and ESCs specifically) is not a universal measurement to determine good from bad. power is a rule of thumb for some and a thermal limit quasi-anecdote for others.
most electronics publish a continuous duty rating. Marketing groups convince owners of the company to tell the engineers to rate the product to an industry standard or a common practice or market making ratings. continuous means continuous for some, 10 minutes for some, and 5 minutes for others.
Having allot of power doesnt help you win races unless its useable. The only way to make sure its useable if to break it down into its elements. Torque and rpm. Some torques and rpms are better than others as measured by the amount of heat they generate. Some torques and rpms are more important to the track than other torques and rpms. The motors job is to meet the requirements of the track as efficiently as possible.
as a manufacturer you have to make a decision on what your max duty cycle is based on a curve. You pay the bills by selling motors or batteries or esc. you pay the bills for a long time when those electronics last a realistic amount of time. So a manufacturer picks a continuous rating based on previous limitations and needs. They publish a number that should be whatever they agreed continuous rating should be but there is a peak and an intermittent value that may or may not get published and there is certainly not a good explanation of what they are and why you care.
if an electric motor can burst to 120 amps but only runs at a constant speed of 5 amps what do you really understand about the motor. you could say power. If the motor is 5 amps at 30 degrees timing but 10 at 31 can you really say you understand power? in non rc engineering if someone calls and asks for a 1/2 horsepower motor nobody will answer unless the marketing department forces them to. they will ask you how much toque you need at what rpm. The biggest reason is because electric motors have an efficiency curve that goes beyond what the motor can continuously do but if the continuous rating is 10 minutes and you only need 1nm of torque for 30 seconds you can buy a motor much smaller because the smaller motor can cross over continuous for 30 seconds and rest for 9:30. This is a standard. its a standard because of economics. if a robot manufacturer asks 3 motor suppliers for quotes on a 1/2 hp motor who will have the lowest cost and be the most efficient? there is no downside unless you dont understand your own motor.
so there are 3 curves. continuous, peak and intermittent. they could represent arcing across insulators or thermal limits. they also apply to a battery. if you take apart a lipo and put it under a very powerful microscope and compare good to bad you will see granulation on the surface of the internal conductors of the anode or cathode (i cant remember). they know the rate of granulation increases with higher heat and that is all they can conclusively say right now (couple years ago). if you go above the continuous rating of a battery by allot for a short amount of time it will recover if it rests for awhile (maybe just lower consumption) but certainly less than the continuous rating.
torque is different at all rpms because efficiency is different. your loads are different and acceleration requires allot more torque than braking or continuous motion. power doesnt really help you build a lightweight dynamic cost effective product. if it help you to be faster great but you can have less failures, be faster, cheaper, if you understand that a rating isnt really anything if the mfg doesnt tell you what it means and the RC world is the wild west. getting what you want starts with an understanding of heat generation, efficiency, and dissipation. what the acceleration and continuous torque/rpm profile is needed for a track and load.