I've got to go with Beery on this.
Take your car battery and put it on a charger with an ammeter. Let it charge as long as you like and watch the meter. The battery will continue to suck current for as long as you let it. Not much near the end, but some.
That 100% is an arbritrary number based on a new battery's capacity. From the time the battery is produced the plates start to get covered with sulfates and the acid continually loses it's strength.
The lead-acid battery in my truck is about 4 years old. When it was new, it was rated at 650 cranking amps but can now only provide about 350. Nevertheless, it will charge to its present capacity fairly rapidly, and then continue to draw current for as long as I leave it on the charger.
Another for instance. My laptop battery, which uses much more advanced technology than the old lead-acid types, will never show more than 98% charge, no matter how long it has been plugged in. I think that some of the battery monitoring utilities on some laptops have a "refresh" function that redefines 100% to be the current level of charge. That way, it can report 100% charge, for a while, even though the present capacity is lower than it was when new.
Perhaps something like that refresh function could be used to fool ChEng into believing that it was now time to go to normal running on the engines. That would probably require the SDK though.
JBC
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