Why do we need 100 batteries for a single flashlight?
Well, mainly due to mommy PDA flashlight that took off with that Welder guy. She’s a tramp, aims at the riches. So now we have only 100 batteries and a whole lot of little Flashlight mouths to feed. And yet they wonder why the kids beat up mp3 players for batteries.
Huh?
I don’t think that it actually uses a hundred individual batteries. The battery system seems to be a bit of an abstraction, and the number looks to relate more to overall ‘charge’ than actual quantity of discrete units.
Thus it may be that 50 ‘batteries’ = 1 D battery or something of the like.
One batterie = 100% charges. that’s why. You will need a number to use it so it’s 100. Not 101. not 99. Because number like this sucks and 100 is fine to do all your mess around.
Edit @ darth_servo, i just noticed that the “%” missed.
This. Although it’s not necessarily 1 battery = 100 charges, it’s just that you have an abstract pile of “battery” units, and a flashlight happens to hold exactly 100 of them when fully charged.
Also, as far as gameplay goes, it’s much MUCH better to have an abstraction than to fuss over what electronics take D-cells, and which ones take 9-volts. No one wants to be walking around with a million AA batteries, and nothing to use in their three different types of flashlights.
But cant you…Drop charges of batteries?..
Yes, you actually hold charges of batteries in your purse, ladyboy. 
You can even hold a single charge in your hand and stick it in a soldering iron. You can even have units to value the ammount the work you do. It’s called money.
It’s really more of a subjective thing, where your imagination takes you. Myself, for example, made a dark joke in the second post. In fifteen years, who knows, we’ll all have foldable, bendable portable devices that all use a standardized power supply format, the new AAA.
I’d like to get rid of the abstraction in favor of a minimalist battery system, but that’s just me. It bugs me a little that charges don’t have containers. I think I made a thread or a post on the subject but it didn’t get much traction.
But it’s a minor cosmetic thing, really. I prefer to focus on stuff that will affect gameplay. In the meantime, you can always pretend there’s some new universal power cell that everything uses, and the container is small and insubstantial enough to not bother keeping track of.
This.
I always imagined the batteries to be a bundle of small magnetic balls that burn up when used in something like a flashlight