What is a lifter?
It is a device that flies silently, and can lift its own payload along with additional weight.
At it's simplest a lifter is no more than something that funnels an electric fee towards a particular direction.
If you can fantasize it is very much like a rocket in that used fuel comes out one end -- however the lifter is electrical in nature and it pushes itself up when it has electricity pushed down.
In electrical terms it is no more than a capacitor. A capacitor in the original sense is just two conductive plates. This capacitor, however, requires high voltage.
You may have heard of the term, assymmetrical -- that is science talk for one plate being much larger than the other which is how the thrust is produced -- otherwise it would just hold it like a quarterly battery would.
Whenever you apply 20-30 kv to the capacitor the larger side will try to go towards the smaller side. The classical lifter school experiment has a copper wire as the small side while a aluminum foil skirt composes the larger side.
Using electrical energy versus chemical energy found in planes, jets and rockets does not at first seem like a huge deal until you understand that it is Much easier to build and contend an electrical craft over a chemical one.
A chemical one can be very noisy -- ever been to an airport? Ever watched the space shuttle launch?
Lifters have been tested in a vacuum environment that is close to what space would be and still work which means we can use them in space as well as the atmosphere.
There are of course hundreds of replications of desktop lifters that can be found on YouTube but there is minuscule to no evidence of ones that are large adequate to hold humans. Easy economics have shown that they are not worth replacing planes at the moment.
There are many theories as to exactly what is happening with the lifter. Much of the thrust found is generated by the so-called elektro-static model, however knowing that Nasa has tested these in a vacuum leaves open-ended questions since this scientific model does not work in a vacuum.
Many builders of lifters purchase high voltage power supplies specifically for powering these, but there are Diy resources ready too.
For instance an old Crt monitor or television can of course be used as a power source. Even if you do not have any sitting nearby many citizen still have them in their garages and would be more than happy to get rid of them.
What is a Lifter Craft?
