[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

!!THE LIGHTNING BOLT BOMBER!!

If you go to google and look up "rocket lightning" you'll see rockets with wires attached to them causing/inducing lightning strikes in thunder storms.

It's similar to flying a kite in a thunderstorm But the string is conductive.

My idea is to drop a coil of wire from a lightning proof airplane (an airplane designed to act like a Faraday cage) during a thunder storm and let the coil unravel it's self by keeping the end of the coil on board the ship as the rest of it drops.

Its my theory that as the coil gets close to hitting the ground it will induce a lightning strike (by acting like a huge lightning rod) giving you the ability to place a bolt of lightning were ever you want thus giving you the ability to strike your enemies with lightning like a Greek god.

It would be some sort of plasma bomber and with it you can cause damage without anybody to blame because you can easily say that the lightning was natural.

you drop coils like bombs and when the lightning strikes the wire it will vaporize the wire leaving no evidence behind except maybe a smoldering spool which could be made to vaporize if it was made of the right stuff.

kim jon un suddenly gets a report that the all the power-plants of Pyongyang have all mysteriously been repeatedly struck by lightning and there are black outs all over the country

meanwhile plasma bombers hide in the storm clouds tossing thunder bolts at high profile targets and officers.

Imagine if you wanted to kill a dictator without making him a martyr out of him.  getting struck by lightning might do the trick.  and the possibility of insurance fraud becomes overwhelming [B)]



Muhahahahahaha.... Muhuhahahahaha!

[chiralSPO]

Instead of wire, why not use a laser that can ionize the air (UV or x-ray), creating a path for the lightning to travel along the laser beam?

[alancalverd]

Flying near an active thundercloud is difficult enough, without trailing a couple of miles of wire and hoping the end hits your target as you hurtle past at 200 mph or more. You might manage with a helicopter but the wind beneath an active cumulonimbus is very variable. Either way if the wire tangles round a tree, you are in big trouble.     

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

hmm...  I like the Idea of a laser. But I would think that a laser of that caliber would be massive... But then again, you would only need a laser capable of making an intense beam pulse for only a split second in-order to induce a lightning strike.  sooo the laser might not need to be very big at all.

Now that would Be an evil weapon! 

Though I have seen online demos of laser induced plasma, something is telling me that it wouldn't work to induce a bolt of lightning.

I would however like to know how it would be done.  I imagine you would need a large laser diode connected to a bank of capacitors then discharge the capacitors into the laser for a high energy pulse, the laser wouldnt be on for long enough to overheat and break the laser.

am I right to assume that you would need a circuit like this?

OR

you could attach a rocket to the wire and shoot the rocket downward and also be able to direct the rocket with radio or whatever to hit a target with a great deal of accuracy

[alancalverd]

IIRC air ionsation is usually done with CO2 lasers, or possibly ruby glass - much shorter and more intense pulses than you can get with a semiconductor.

If you can direct a rocket with sufficient accuracy, why mess with unreliable static electricity? Better still, use a slow-flying drone so you can guide it visually. 

There may however be some point in this. Thunderstorms are a real hazard near airports. If you could disrupt the electric field in  cumulonimbus by firing a laser at it you might save a lot of delays, diversions and downdraughts. We think that the electric charge separation is caused by convection, but an internal discharge might break up the principal convective flow.

[evan_au]

A few challenges that laser weapons designers have been trying to deal with:

• Laser light propagates well through still, clear air, with a small divergence.
  
• However, if the laser is intense enough to heat the air, the air turns into a diverging lens, spreading out the light.
  
• Laser light is rapidly dispersed in dust, fog or rain (although infra-red light is less affected than visible light).
  
• Laser light is immediately absorbed and turns into broad spectrum radiation when it hits plasma.

So, the natural tendency would be for a plasma to form first right near the laser (where the beam is more concentrated). This will prevent the intensity from creating a plasma further away.

Perhaps what you need is to first focus further away, and then focus closer so the plasma moves closer, drawing a line of plasma in the air?.