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Re: Why dont you make some BL
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The entire process of shooting flaming balls of electricity was of course
an early attempt to make a new type of weapon which initially stemmed from
research into capacitor discharges thru laser beams which of course doesn't
work very well due to atmospheric attenuation. Sandia and Los Alamos Natl
Labs both did a considerable amount of research on this very project and
did suceed very well. First your create a plasma in a chamber. Now make
the chamber large enough so the plasma starts to fold over onto itself, ie,
the typical plasma instability models. Next, if the conditions and chamber
are correct dimensions, the plasma will completely fold over and form -- ta
da! -- a torus shape. Now, just create the torus quickly and then use a
magnetic field to project it rapid out of the vessel and your have a torus
shaped charge of "ball lightning". This all works quite readily but along
the way they discoved something else very neat -- you don't really need a
plasma at all, in fact, you don't want one due again to our friend
atmospheric attenuation. The real neat process begins when you realize you
don't really want to project a plasma -- you just want to project a poweful
magnetic field in a torus shape, so you eliminate the plasma and create
instead a torus shaped magnetic field and then use another torus shaped
field to project the initial field. This works very well and will project
at velocities up to 200 km/sec and create very intense fields capable of
producing a potential difference of 2 MEV across a sheet of pure copper at
a distance of nearly 1 km. The other great aspect of this approach is that
the projected field is non-ionizing and is invisible! At this point
everything suddenly becomes classified and no more information is available
-- unless of course one of your friends works there -- then, well . . . .