Why does it take so long, to pack in the electrons.. All I wanna do is fly baby fly!

Ah the plight of all consumers of power, how to get more and more out of the smallest can. We all dream of a suit like Iron Man, zipping around for hours... Or running attack patterns up and down the queue as we stand at the end of a line. If only we could suck endless energy from that wee little battery.

So if your wondering why there is a limit to how fast you can suck it out, and then put it back in.. perhaps think of it in terms of what it really is. The energy from that battery is not a magical force, but a fluid stream of electrons flying invisible along the outside of a wire. Perhaps if you ponder instead that the wire is filled with water.

That battery is like a balloon filled with water. It's under pressure, and filled to the point of exploding. You can jostle it and have all that potential dump out, but the balloon pops. Or you can pull the water out the opening, limited only by how big the opening is, and how elastic that balloon is.

Just like a battery. In that wee little cell, electrons are spread evenly about the cell, under pressure so to speak, just waiting for a way to get free. The electrons have to stack up and find a path to freedom, ordering up along the ion channels so they can flow together in a rush.

Now we can keep it really simple here, and go with the very basics. Imagine that balloon attached to a hose with a Y valve. Open the valve and water floods in. Close the valve and water floods out. You can fill it up, and you can dump it out. If you mishandle it, it will simply explode. If you try to fill it too fast, it will explode. If you try to dump it out too fast, it will explode.

Get it now? This is why physics still wins. Its not magic, but a stream that we store in a pouch, then pull free on demand. The harder we demand, the shorter the life on that pouch. The harder we push it back in, the more likely we will cause it to fail. And to protect those that believe in magic from the magic in the can, those that build them place controls to insure they don't explode. Noone wants this balloon to burst, and when they do... It makes national news.

If you want to fly harder, buy more balloons :) Of course there is so much more behind the curtain.... all the whys and hows.. And it remains the dream of every engineer alive, the promise of unlimited potential from any itty bitty can. The power to squish a quarter, fly in a ironman suit, or just zip my RC chopper till I get tired of it. So worry not, if it could be, it would be :)