Ball Lightning

“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.

Then I saw someone hoisting a small model airplane on a pulley high up into the space between the nozzles. Lin Yun said, “That’s the strike target. It’s the cheapest kind, only able to fly in a straight line.”

Turning around, Lin Yun led me into a small room in the corner of the building—a glassed-in iron cage, really—that contained an instrument panel. She said, “The lightning doesn’t usually strike over here, but for safety reasons, we built this shielded control room. It’s a Faraday cage.” She handed me a plastic bag containing a set of earplugs. “It gets very loud. You’ll damage your hearing without earplugs.”

When she saw I had the earplugs in, she pressed a red button on the console and the two machines roared to life, their nozzles high up on the wall spraying red and blue mist into the room to form a strange sight under the floodlights shining from the dome.

She said, “Charged air is normally colorless. To see more clearly, the charging process adds a large quantity of aerosol particles.”