Ball Lightning(21)
“The National Laboratory for Superconductivity at CAS has developed high-energy batteries made of room-temperature superconducting material. They can store lots of power simply by flowing current continuously through a large loop of superconducting wire.”
Then the helicopter began to discharge to the ground, for a longer duration this time, but at a low intensity. A long, thin arc connected ground and helicopter, snaking through the air like a dancer’s graceful curves, or a windblown strand of UV-emitting spider silk.
“This is a low-intensity, continuous release of the superconductor battery’s residual energy. The battery is highly unstable and not very safe, so ordinarily it can’t store a charge. Let’s wait a bit—this will take at least ten minutes. It’s a nice sound, isn’t it?”
The power release wasn’t loud, but it sounded like fingernails on glass, and gave me goose bumps.
I asked, “How many times can you repeat that high-intensity release?”
“That depends on the number and capacity of the superconductor batteries. This helicopter could manage eight to ten, but we can’t drain the residual power in that way.”
“Why not?”
“People would protest.” She pointed to the north, where I saw a group of luxury homes not too far from the base. “The base was originally meant to be farther from the city, but for various reasons it was built here. You’ll see later on that noise nuisance isn’t the only consequence of this mistake.”
When the residual power was drained, she took me to look at the equipment on the helicopter. Unfamiliar with electronics and machinery, I didn’t understand much, but I was deeply impressed by the cylindrical superconductor batteries.
“So you say this system isn’t successful?” I asked, inwardly amazed at what I’d just witnessed.
“First Lieutenant Yang is an attack helicopter pilot with the Thirty-Eighth Army Aviation Regiment. He is most qualified to draw a conclusion.”
I thought about the ball lightning eyewitness, but the man in front of me was a little younger. He said, “The first time I saw this, I was really excited for a while. I felt like I couldn’t praise it enough, and that it would greatly increase the ground attack capabilities of our armed helicopters....?Basically, I was as excited as a World War I pilot seeing one of today’s guided missiles! But I soon realized that it’s nothing more than a toy.”
“Why?”
“First, the attack range. No more than one hundred meters from its target, or it won’t release electricity. A grenade can go a hundred meters.”
Lin Yun said, “We tried everything, but that’s the range limit.”
This was easy to understand. The energy in the superconductor battery was far too insufficient to produce natural lightning in an arc several kilometers long, and even if this energy could be generated by other means, like nuclear reactions, no existing weapons platform—be it armed helicopter or destroyer—would be able to withstand such an energy discharge: when shooting lightning, they’d end up destroying themselves first.
The lieutenant said, “There’s another thing that’s even more ridiculous...?but I’ll let Dr. Lin explain it herself.”
Lin Yun said, “You’ve probably already thought of it.”
This time I had. “You’re referring to a discharge pole?”
“Yes.” She pointed to the red square area with the oil barrels, still burning. “We gave that red area a negative charge of 1.5 coulombs in advance.”
I thought for a moment. “Would it be possible to use another means, like radiation, to induce a negative charge in the target area from a distance?”
“That was one thing we considered from the start, and we began R&D on a long-range electrostatic charger concurrently with this discharge device, but the technology was very difficult, particularly under combat conditions, where effectively fighting a moving target requires completing the charging process within roughly one second. Under current technical conditions, that’s practically impossible.” She sighed. “Like the lieutenant said, we created a toy. We can demonstrate it to scare people a little, but it has no actual combat value.”
Then she took me to see the next project. “You’ll probably be most interested in this,” she said. “We’re producing lightning in the atmosphere.”
We entered the high, wide-roofed building, which Lin Yun told me was converted from a large warehouse. A row of floodlights on the high domed ceiling illuminated the vast space, where our footsteps echoed, and Lin Yun’s voice produced a pleasant echo as well.
“Ordinary lightning produced by thunderclouds is pretty hard to make artificially on a large scale, so there’s little military value. Our research objective is to produce dry lightning—that is, lightning discharged by an electric field produced in electrified air, with no involvement of clouds.”
“That’s what you said at Mount Tai.”
Lin Yun showed me two machines installed along a wall, each the size of a truck, that resembled enormous air compressors and consisted largely of high pressure airbags. “These are electrostatic air generators. They take a large volume of air, charge it, and then expel it. The two machines produce positive and negatively charged air.”
A thick tube ran from each generator along the wall at ground level, with thin tubes, more than a hundred in all, extending vertically along it at regular distances to two rows of nozzles affixed to the wall, one high and one low. Lin Yun told me that the one set of nozzles sprayed positively charged air, and the other negatively charged air, to form a discharge field.