Comment by bigiain

> To be fair, in some applications the short-term peak rating is an important metric in its own right.

Cars are a good example of this. There are very few public roads in the world where a car can use 1000hp for more than a few or perhaps a few tests of seconds at a time. On a drag strip a 1000hp street car might run a low 9 second quarter mile reaching around 150mph. That'll put you in jail if a cop sees you doing that speed in a lot pf places. To maintain the fastest speed limit in most countries probably doesn't even require 100hp. So a "short term peak rating" that lets you use 1000hp for 10 seconds will accelerate you in a _very_ "sporting" fashion for as long as you're likely to be able to hold the accelerator down (outside of a race track or autobahn).

Back when I raced quadcopters, I'd happily set them up to pull 200% or more of the rated power of the motors and batteries, because if you kept it pinned at full throttle it would have vanished out of sight within 2 seconds. (You had to be somewhat more circumspect with the motor controllers, the magic smoke could come out of those way faster - sometimes going pop effectively instantly if you started to approach 150% of rated capacity, sometimes even 120% would blow them up ij just a few hundred milliseconds.)