Quote:
Originally Posted by ryan2006
Hi, my name is Ryan and I have this idea to use make a propulsion system that emmits lightening bolts can anyone expand on this idea?
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I don’t think lightning is very good for propelling vehicles.
In a relatively dense medium, such as the Earth’s atmosphere lightning-like discharges could be used to heat air and produce jet propulsion, in the same manner that jet fuel is used in ordinary jet engines, or as was proposed in the 1940s-1960s for
nuclear fission powered aircraft. However, such a scheme would require a lot of electric power, which would need to be generated by some portable power supply, which would require fuel, which would, I'm fairly sure, be much less efficient overall than simply burning the fuel in a conventional jet engine, or using a nuclear or other exotic fuel to directly heat a jet engine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ryan2006
It is a controlled propulsion system that winds the currents into a tangle collecting electricity from its surroundings
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If you have currents, in ionized air, as with lightning, or in more ordinary conductors, I don’t think you could use them to get more electricity from their surroundings. To the best of my knowledge – and counter to the unproven claims of Tesla and their many present-day supporters – there’s no way of “tricking” electrons out of a material other than the usual manner of applying a voltage or a moving magnetic field to it, and in either case, the resulting current has less energy than was used to produced it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by modest
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David Thompson’s webpage strikes me as fairly typical Tesla fan writing. Overlooking its typical-of-kind conspiracy theorizing, it expresses, in this sentence
For example, a 24ft diameter conductive sphere could be isolated from Earth ground. Three combination coils such as those I built could be placed at three locations around the sphere. When the three coils are tuned such that a single standing wave is focused at one point, there would be a huge electrostatic potential with a vector being maintained. This huge electrostatic potential, if pointed to the Earth, would repel the Earth since both are negative in charge. The repulsion could be strong enough to cause the sphere to remain levitated, or even lift away from the Earth.
one of the central claim of what I call, for lack of a better name, Tesla-ism: that the Earth has a consistent local or net negative charge. This simply isn’t true – in any practical sense, nearly all material on Earth has a nearly neutral charge, with small local negative charges being about as common as small local positive ones.
In defense of Tesla, I don’t believe he claimed, other than when in the grip of severe mental illness, that the Earth had a net negative charge. From my limited reading of Tesla literature (none of it actually written by him), he believed that it was possible to “trick” the Earth into locally giving up electrons via high-frequency changing magnetic field or radio beam requiring less power than obtained from the electric current produced by the electrons. This idea is, I think, unsupported by experimentally verified physics, and most likely wrong.
Another idea put forth on Thomson’s webpage is
Such a propulsion system would not have to be limited to Earth travel. Creating a charged standing wave on a spacecraft and pointing the charge at the solar wind could provide propulsion. The charge could be made to repel the solar wind to move away, or be attracted to slow down or move toward the Sun.
While at first glance nonsensical, can be re-interpreted to make more sense. As the solar wind consists of primarily protons and much less massive electrons, with predictable average velocity, one could in principle make an “inside-out particle accelerator” type of moving magnetic field producing device, which would allow one to use these protons as reaction mass in what would be effectively an
ion thruster, but unlike a conventional ion thruster, would have an practically inexhaustible source of ions. However, like an ion thruster, it would require a lot of energy for a given
impulse, so unless it had a low-mass power source many times greater than any available today, would be limited to very small thrusts.
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Lightning vs. other power sources / Debunking some Tesla-isms
