Is there a place to propose a new propulsion method?
Who would listen to an outsider?
How outlandish is it?
It isn't hard to describe though.
Otherwise the suggestion to find a patent attorney is a good one. If it’s not worth investing a few thousand ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ may as well just tell us.
Has anyone considered using the tremendous electric fields from between the lower and upper atmospheres by using a gyrotron tuned (60ghz) to excite oxygen? The excited oxygen if it can become hot enough will dissociate into atomic oxygen and conduct electricity. A gyrotron is a maser so it should be possible to tightly focus a 5mm wave. Gyrotrons have been reported to have output intensity up to 100 megawatts in a pulsed duration. Gyrotrons are fairly efficient compared to lasers and more selective to atmospheric oxygen.
A vessel in the stratosphere near the equator over the ocean could send a beam down to the ground at the same time it is being sent above. These are the artificial streamers we wish to create to connect the ground to the upper atmosphere. A massive flow of charge is directed into an expendable cartage containing a filament. Part of the strike energy goes into a solenoid that expels the filament plasma at near relativistic speeds. That is assuming 100 million joules could do that. The typical lightning strike is sometimes 5 gigajoules..
Going all the way to ground to the exosphere could draw a lot more than 100 megajoules even on a calm day.
Ok, the audacious thing here besides using lightning for propulsion is that this is a non chemical, non nuclear high payload fraction booster propulsion engine which can operate using carbon fiber filament cartridges and carrier planes.
My understanding has always been plasma propulsion uses high energy to generate sustained low thrust without reaction mass, making it most suitable where there is high energy availability (portable fusion reactor, etc.) and a long slow acceleration is fine, that is, deep space.
With the atmospheric conductors, you are basically talking about artificial lightning, correct? Potentially a lot of energy, to be sure! The big questions must be how to harness it and for what uses it is best suited. Is there not speculation on this (sci fi or academic)? I seem to remember reading about this as being a “problem” to be solved as part of a space elevator design.
Then there was another experiment using an ultra high power laser to do what I proposed above except using uv radiation (which is clearly ionizing), instead of microwaves (which ordinarily are never ionizing). From reading discussions about plasma in tokamaks and polywells I understand that plasma can indeed form with enough heat from gyrotrons. Lasers are just not powerful enough to make a long enough plasma lightning rod. The researchers who used the laser were successful at triggering lightning between clouds. My contribution is "maybe gyrotrons are powerful / more effective".
In SciFi and Acadamia there is tremendous interest in high power non chemical propulsion. In the past it has centered on nuclear energy. The problem with it is the thermal nature of it and the difficulty of scaling it to powers we have on earth. In the air and in space it is challenging to exchange waste heat.
But the ironic thing to me is that ultra high energy is around us all the time if we only knew what to do with it. It is over the earth, in the Van Allen Belts, in solar wind, it is even in the magnetic field of the sun.
Looks like someone may have been around this concept a lot longer than I have. But for radio reception, not for long distance atmospheric discharge channeling.
I think the solenoid / filament idea is simply untenable due to the enormous amount of power concentrated in them (a coil would simply vaporize). A much more straightforward idea would be to use an open ended tube capped on one side (with shielding) that is lined on the top and bottom with graphite conductors, in a configuration you might find in a rail gun. Graphite is used as I am hoping some of the crazy thermal issues may be better handled with ablation instead of active cooling. Think of a railgun tube being like a combustion chamber. There may be some advantages to including an magnetic expansion nozzle. Liquid propellant (liquid methane for example) could be injected inside and when the lightning comes in contact with the top and bottom rails massive amounts of current flow and thoroughly ionize the propellant. Huge Lorenz forces from the multi kilo-amp / mega-volt discharge develop in the conductive plasma blasting it out at around. An electromagnetic sheath might be advantageous to keep the hot plasma from pressing too hard on the tube / rails conducting away energy. Exhaust velocity can be tuned depending on needs during boost. On the low end, 200 kilograms could impart ~1000000 newtons of thrust at an exhaust velocity of about 7km/s. On the high end 2 kg of propellant could yield ~100000 newtons, 1/10th the trust but 10 times the specific impulse. Of course these are just rough calculations in very ideal circumstances.