A quick boot up and down the street with the gauges working gave me an idea of what's going on under the hood. Exactly what I needed to know before getting much farther.
I never saw more than ~150 battery amps being pulled. However, it took no effort to peg the 500a motor ammeter on take off in first, and most of the time in 2nd.
This tells me I need to add some field control, so I have more torque on take-off or when I need to accelerate in "too high" of a gear.
I also need to check the settings on the Link-10. It seemed to think I used up 10 amp-hours in about 2 minutes of driving. Even if I was pulling 150 battery amps for the whole time, I would have only used 5 amp-hours, and it was not sucking down 150 amps the whole time. I haven't messed with the Puekert or battery capacity settings since putting it in. I'd assume that's where my issues lie. Maybe I'll go muddle with them right now...
...back.
I checked and changed the key settings. Then decided to re-test the power consumption. Seeing as I didn't change much in the settings, I must have been smoking something, or else it changed resolution of the AH after it hit some threshold. I only managed to use 1.5ah in 3 short test runs. That's much better.
The amps in 2nd gear began dropping off after it got up to a moderate speed, so either the controller was cutting back the current already(shouldn't be), or 72-volts isn't enough to keep pushing current in to the motor above a certain rpm. Since everything I read suggested that 72 volts is
not enough for real EV use, that's presumably it. Maybe some field weakening would help a bit, but I don't see it as a real solution. Looks like I'll be configuring it for 144v after all, though we'll see once I have more control over the motor.
It's interesting that a mere 4 amps/300 watts out of the battery is enough to get it moving on level ground, at roughly a walking pace. I like that.
