[PSUBS-MAILIST] operational parametres...

having read your email I agree that this was probably the wrong venue to raise the matter of an idea about which I can say very little. Sorry for wetting everyone's appetites like that without giving anything solid. The engine that I have designed could be insulated and shielded with fairly light-weight materials which would mean that there would be no 'magnetic-leakage' to disrupt instrumentation, computers, hull-members or shipwrecks. It can be positioned internally or externally in the form of an engine pod. I would favour it as an engine pod as you could place them so that they would contribute to manueverability.

I don't want to give any estimates for performance of a 40 kilowatt engine, because the materials I was working with were absolutely the weakest possible for such an engine. I may give you a figure, but the actual result may turn out to be 5 times as much. For instance, I used ferrite magnets - Neodymium magnets are a little over ten times as powerful, so they would give a much more dramatic result. Also, I used aluminium electrodes - the electrodes need to be made from a noble metal(gold, platinum, etc...) because some of the energy which would go into the propulsive effect goes into tearing apart the electrodes, this does not happen with noble metals. So I really can't say until a bigger model can be built and with the right materials. It should be pretty impressive though.

As for patentability, it is actually an engine I would be patenting, not an idea or a principle. The principles behind this kind of propulsion are well documented in the public-domain. For this reason, it will actually be the engine that I patent. Before I do that, I need to be sure that the design of the engine that I patent is absolutely first-class, thus the necessity for prototyping. I don't want to patent something that can easily be improved upon. It needs to be perfect from the beginning.

I hope I have added a little more credibility to my ideas and my motives for doing things the way I have. I really only wanted advice from the group regarding the idea and how it should be handled. Also to know if anyone knew more about the field than I do. Even the smallest pieces of info can often turn out to be priceless. Thanks guys.