UFO technology

[the guy]

ok, im just hypothesising here, but if you were to create an vehicle which has a very strong positive charge on its base (with a van de graaf generator perhaps) and devices all around the edges somehow fired a stream of postive ions at the ground around it (in the same way that an antistatic gun does onto a record) in order to make the ground positivley charged all around it. Could you make the vehicle levitate and make it fly in one direction by reducing the amount of positive ions fired at the ground in that direction?

I just thought it might work since the charges in the vehicle base and the ground would repel each other since they are alike. feel free to dis this idea and prove it wrong if i am wrong i'm only wondering.

[Flashman]

Since the earth is considered to have a net negative charge, you'd be charging it for years to lift off. Also some experimenters say they have observed movement towards the positive pole of a highly charged capacitor.

[the guy]

oh ok

what if you did it with negative charge then? Would that work any better?

[Flashman]

Possibly... the "anti-gravity" claims of such devices in modern folklore have been attributed more to an ion-thruster type effect...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biefeld%E2%80%93Brown_effect

 

Note if you're doing this on a saucer shaped vehicle you effectively get an ion pumped Coanda effect.

[insane_alien]

look up electrohydrodynamic thrusters (EHD thrusters).

 

very cool to play around with, highly impractical to use on a large scale.