@cjd @lain there's still a very thin atmosphere, which is what ion thrusters in space use, except they try and juice it with noble gasses but it's similar amounts of thrust, except that he's still having to keep thousands of volts on the plate to see this tiny amount. even with very little gas particles, you're still going to ionize some stray particles here and there, and i haven't done any math or anything but it seems plausible to me that it would explain all of the thrust we're seeing here. it's nothing like reports of the tr3b going twenty billion miles per hour in an instant, i don't think we're going to get there with forces so imperceptible that we have to pick it up over hours in a specialized measurement rig, although i bet the head electrostatic guy probably knows more than i do so who knows.
i'd really like to see a f117, a b1, and maybe even a b21 and tr3b in person one day. maybe if they declassify something i'll make a big vacation to the smithsonian or something, i should probably do that before i die anyways i think idk. i bet i could probably spend at least a week just going between all the smithsonian museums
also i just had a funny thought. well what's the most magical thing we know of right now, maybe there's a lot of cool stuff with quantum dots and whatever but like, what i mean air conditioning is pretty much like magic, we suddenly get like 3-4x the amount of energy that we put in, that's pretty magic. so what if instead of like the current ufo lore where it's weird quantum properties of an exotic metamaterial or something, the antigrav is literally just a unit that sits in the middle and looks like a window air conditioning unit, but somehow conducts plasma all around the outside or something and takes advantage of a special phase change between a certain kind of gas and plasma or something. then it'd break in space and so they'd have to call the repair ufo and then this alien in a cap and overalls and red toolbox comes out and is like "well they'res yure prablem. yer compresser's done gone out"