things like this make me regret majoring in english. these assholes get to fire rockets into thunderstorms while i was stuck writing fifty page essays about how the myth of the vanishing american disarmed and precluded any real american indian resistance to white hegemony. fuckers.
Use your history expertise to track down a really old fashioned community with archaic insular local culture, then get some science grad students to build lightning rockets and use them to convince the locals you are Angels or aliens or something. Have have an anthropology professor or film student document it as a reality show called "Behold, Science" where you terrify simple communities with Tesla coils and magnetrons.
Would I be wrong in thinking that the power in these lightning strikes are orders of magnitude lower than natural lightning? I am presuming that there is a wire attached to the rocket which provides a much easier path for the electrical arc to follow than a regular bolt that needs to ionize a path through the air.
Still pretty cool. Ima hookitup to my neighbour's cat.
This is done by launching rockets with a trailing wire, yes. If I remember the show I saw this on, they wait until they detect a certain charge in the atmosphere above and then usually the rocket will trigger a bolt
This clip tells a little more about it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK9Gz77F4S0
Reddit
Digg
Stumble
Facebook
