Russell McMahon wrote:
>
> > I believe these electrostatic/capacitive
> > whatever systems ionise the surrounding air and
> > push upon it with the "asymetrical" charge.
> > In space there will be no matter to push against
> > and it won't work. :o)
>
> The website SAYS that there is a larger effect in air and a smaller one in
> vacuum with the latter not being well understood by NASA. This is what I
> referred to when suggesting use as a thruster. Conceivably one could look at
> arcane effects such as generation of an "electron beam" - they didn't say
> how small the small effect was :-)


Sure, you're right if it DID work in a vacuum
this is a major breakthrough. But *I believe*
again that these need some matter to push against.

The vacuum used in the test was most likely a
vacuum chamber with some mass (ie chamber wall?)
close enough for the electrostatic forces to react
upon.

Have you seen some of the work done using Brown's
patent (from memory) of two opposing weights, one
fired into a lossy gel etc and the other into a
spring? There seems to be a lot of scientific
reason for these designs to produce force in one
direction as the energy in one weight will definitely
be dissipated mainly as heat where the other weight
causes movement of the device...
-Roman

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