[limpet chicken]

I had a thought actually, would using a reactive gas as the ionisation medium cause more damage to the target? my ORIGINAL idea for a plasma based weapon, although probably somewhat deranged, was for a uber-vicious fluorine plasma gun, the F- ion being of course extremely reactive, most likely causing extensive surface damage to metal targets, and fluorine toxicity in addition to massive burns/vaporisation to organic targets.

I wonder, chlorine wouldn't be QUITE as good, as the toxicity effect would be less, but what about a bromine plasma? bromine is easily vaporised and would cause greater toxicity than chlorine probably, due to its lesser use in organic physiology in general.

I don't much fancy trying to obtain pre-pressurised ampoules of fluorine, if such a beast even exists, if the ammunition cartridge broke, then you instantly get yourself fluorinated which would doubtless make for a rather messy and unpleasant termination of the weapon operator, not to mention corrosion of the electrodes and most likely thr gun itself, but bromine should be much more obtainable, AND handleable, and not, for that matter, likely to cause instant death on accidental release.

What do you think of the idea of a halogen plasma?

[Corvettaholic]

I think a halogen plasma is a really good idea! I think I'll just go with chlorine, because its so cheap. If it works, I can test out with bromine just to see how "better" it is. The beautiful thing about a marx generator, is we can build it out of junkyard parts. I was looking at caps, and the price and weight difference between a 5nf and a 500nf cap is astounding. I figure if we have some pre-charged 10kV caps under 10nf, and set it up for a slow discharge through the barrel mounted marx generator we should get enough of an output to do what we need. Why not use dual marx generators, one for each coil? As far as building the marx's, I think we only need something like a 4 or 5 stage stack. Anything more, and we'll have to supply steady current for a lot longer and I don't know how long those supply caps will last. As for insulation, it'll probably be best to make our own. Get something between 0-4 AWG wire, and coat the sucker in epoxy. Diamonds also make a good insulator, but we can't really afford diamond coated wires. This weekend I'm putting new ignition wires on the corvette, and some of the old ones should still be in good enough shape to carry the charge from the caps. My main goal this weekend is to go "acquire" caps from somewhere. I heard you can get some good ones from ham radio festivals, or car audio stuff. I can't find a capacitance ratings on the audio caps though, only voltages.

Another idea I had is (for a prototype) to have a marx generator as a charging station. Its fairly easy to make one that produces 250kV to 1mV, with a halfway decent frequency. Why not use the output of that to charge a monster cap? Something rated in the picofarad range to keep costs down. In terms of wattage, how much do you think we'll need? And how do you figure out how many watts/joules a X farad, X voltage cap will put out?