Why overunity equals antigravity

[tswift]

In my quest for the holy grail of overunity, I have discovered along the way that many of the accounts of inventors who seemed to have credible claims of overunity also observed or were reported to have altered gravitic effects: names like Leedskalnin, Searl, and Sweet, most notably. In particular, on Bearden's "Energy From the Vacuum" #11 video at about 30 minutes in, there is an account by Bearden where he talks about working with Floyd Sweet and told Floyd to weigh the VTA device. Floyd did, and discovered that it indeed lost weight while generating power, in direct linear proportion to the power output. Floyd extrapolated the curve and discovered that if the power was increased beyond the safe limit, the device might levitate. Bearden warned him not to, but related that Floyd later told him that he had been unable to resist the temptation and ramped the output up to about 2000W, whereupon the device indeed levitated. It seemed to have a distinct thrust vector rather than just cancelling gravity, so he was able to tilt it using a tether and fly it around the room.

I have thought for a long time about why this might be, and I believe I have the answer. The answer is simple: it's just the Lorentz force on the wires in the transformer primary and secondary. In a normal transformer operating underunity these forces are in balance: there is a repulsion between the two coils (in a conventional transformer shape, not a toroid). The magnitude of the force on the primary and the magnitude of the force on the secondary are exactly equal and their directions are opposite, so it causes internal stresses in the windings themselves. This is a factor transformer designers have to consider because it can generate noise and cause the windings to loosen. Nothing unusual about this, it's standard electrical engineering.

But now let's consider what happens when the transformer is operating overunity. When the current going into the primary has a radiant component, then Lenz's law is partially cancelled and the secondary current can exceed (perhaps even greatly exceed) the normal value, leading to energy gain. This is what happens in the output transformer of the Don Smith device, the motor in the Ed Gray device, and the output coils of the VTA, for instance. Let's do a little arithmetic to illustrate this.

Consider a normal transformer, perhaps a microwave oven transformer:


In a typical transformer of this type, the primary voltage would be 120VAC, the primary current 15A at full load, and the primary windings would number about 120 (usually about one turn per volts for most MOT's). The core will run very close to saturation because they are designed cheaply, so about 1.4 Tesla for regular silicon steel. The secondary will have about 1200 turns, to give something close to 2KV when rectified and filtered. The mean length of a turn for a typical MOT might be 30 cm. The Lorentz force formula is F=B*i*L, where F is in Newtons, B is in Tesla, i in Amperes, and L in meters. For the secondary, the force is:

F = 1.4T * 1.5A * (0.3m*1200) = 756 Newtons (~170 pounds force)

And for the primary:

F= 1.4T * 15A * (0.3m*120) = 756 Newtons

So they end up identically equal, which is why transformers don't give a net thrust while under load. But now if, through the magic of overunity, the primary current is only 1/10 as much while keeping the secondary current the same, then clearly the reaction force on the primary is now 1/10 as much as well, leading to a net force of 9/10 of 756 Newtons in the direction of the secondary. These are averages over an AC cycle: the actual force would vary from 0 to 1.414 times the average with a frequency of 120 Hz, but integrated over time the net resultant force would be 680N in this case, about 150 pounds!

So it can be seen that any overunity gain in a transformer will give rise to a net unbalanced force. What is it pushing on? That's a good question. The conventional physicists assume that two magnets can push on each other without anything in between, so they will have a great deal of difficulty answering this one. This is essentially just one magnet pushing on the same something that pushes two magnets toward or apart from each other in the conventional case. In the case of a toroidal transformer, I assume that the situation would give rise to a net torque instead of a linear force, but I haven't fully worked through it to prove that.

The magnitude of the forces involved is also not small. Even a very small COP gain in a transformer should be measurable and a COP of 2 or more would be very noticeable. The weight of a typical microwave oven transformer might be 15 pounds, so in this example it would have a 10:1 thrust to weight ratio. This places it in the category of the best military jet engines. It would not be hard to optimize a transformer design to maximize the thrust by shorting the secondary winding, which would probably be just one very heavy turn. Since the power drawn would mostly be overunity, it would be getting cold from the endothermic effect at the same time as it was getting hot by resistive heating. Only experimentation can really determine how this would work in practice, I'm just speculating but hopefully this is at least informed speculation. If transformers can be built with a 10:1 thrust ratio, then vehicle applications immediately spring to mind....

[thaelin]

Hi TSwift:
I have to say your post caught my attention on this one. Your math lays out an interesting paradox. Design a transformer to cancel out its self. Not good if your MW floats while cooking. If you look back through a lot of the old movies and novels, the transports and shuttles used do infact use "coils" to lift with. Couple that with an alternate design and you may well be spot on it. My bench has had to set idle for quite some time but think its time to start playing again. Mechanical project done and proven, on to other things.

[tswift]

Good! I hope you come up with something very interesting, please share it with everyone if you do. My own experimenting time, budget, and bench space is limited and I have way more ideas than I have ability to test them any time soon. Hopefully I can provide some stimulus to you and other experimenters to get going on some experiments.

[Bob Smith]

Great stuff, Tom!
The question now is how to arrive at what is commonly referred to as "overunity."
It's my firm belief that a system can't be overunity, as a closed system.
For an excess energy output, it must be an open system. That is, it must draw in charge from outside itself (e.g., the ambient).
One way of avoiding major food fights in this area is to talk about COP>1.

Do you see frequency and resonance playing a role in the transformer's ability to surpass a COP of 1?
Bob

[Sputins]

The Gravity of it all...

I’m not entirely convinced that one must achieve an overunity effect in order to affect gravity, inertia or related phenomena. But it is likely that there is a strong relationship there.

However as far as the importance of it, or as far as an experimental outcome, a so called anti-gravity effect would equal if not surpass that of an overunity outcome. Many say they want overunity but not as many say they want an antigravity or an outcome that that changes the way we look at the known laws of physics.

At least in the sense if you produced a black box that you claim (greatly) distorted of affected gravity within a local zone, this would likely attract the attention of “agencies” quicker than claiming you had a black box that produced overunity…

Gravity is a bi-polar. In my opinion the gravity of a certain substance or mass is related to the position of the nucleus within its atoms. The nucleus position is set by the overall charge distribution within the atom. So using (overunity) devices to affect charge disposition (or remove electrons) within an atom (metallic lattice) may be one method of affecting the “mass” of a given substance. Another avenue of possibility, in my opinion is with affecting the charge of the hydrogen atom or the water molecule?

"The Long Path to Understanding Gravity” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkWi...8x3dI-mLbU1YCD

[RAMSET]

A repost on the topic of gravity from a friend

@Quote
some time ago I got this information during a phone-talk with a fieind who was in direct contact to the ungarian Physics Professor Dr. Gyula Szasz who had the rare opportunity - as a single privat person - to do a experiment in the drop-tower of Bremen ( Germany ) . Only big companies have the money to pay for such experminents in this institution. So they charged no money for this single experiment.
Intro to ZARM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QKzcFR5fSY

As long as we repeat old failures from the past will we not gather new insights into "the big G".
So what is the failure we are repeating again and again ?
We use a random mix of elements to perfom the old drop-experiment. Not so Prof. Szasz

Please read the comments below the following video by pressing the button "weiter"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXHhfFa1Cgw

and again the 4 seconds where you can watch what is going on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkNjvCmsWOU

The crew of the drop-tower was so ethousiastic after this experminent that they wanted to continue with additional tests at no cost for Prof. Szasz but got a call from some "important" physicist in a german institution to stop all work on this.

Here is the only discussion by Prof. Sazs however only in german language which I present to you via google translator:

https://translate.google.de/translat...3ed&edit-text=

Document about the experiment by Prof. Sazsz in english:

http://web.archive.org/web/200906120...szaszgyula.pdf

website with a complete description of all succeding events : http://atomsz.com/

end Quote
--------------
respectfully

Chet K

[tswift]

Chet, that is some very good interesting information. Really hard, quantified science. Yet again, it becomes clear that we really don't know the full answer when it comes to gravity either. In science, it seems that when you are sure you really think you understand the whole picture, this is guaranteed to be proven wrong eventually, although it may take hundreds of years for it to come to light.

I think there is significant evidence that gravity is just a manifestation of electromagnetism. Scientists are now talking about possibly finding a fifth fundamental force, and so far we may not even have found four. Of the known forces, only gravity and electromagnetism follow the inverse square law. Gravity also has a very deep symmetry with electromagnetism in the concept called "gravitomagnetism", which is the angular equivalent of the linear law of gravity. Just like a circulating electric current in a closed loop causes a magnetic field, a circulation of mass around an axis causes a "gravitomagnetic" field component. This is known and accepted science taught in universities and textbooks.

I also read once about an experiment supposedly done by the late Boyd Bushman, an aerospace engineer with (I think) Lockheed during his career. The story was that he used the tall stairwell of his engineering building as a primitive drop tower (but not vacuum, obviously). He dropped test masses which had magnets inside. In one mass, the magnets were arranged to attract and in the other they were arranged to repel, as in a bucking configuration. As the story goes, observers at the bottom of the stairwell reported that the mass with the bucking magnets consistently fell slightly slower. This is so simple that I actually tried it. I got several small neodymium ring magnets and bolted through their center holes with brass bolts. Two in attraction, two in repulsion. Using a long beam balance I weighed the two and was unable to measure any difference in their static weight, but this is not the same as proving the case in free fall. I determined that the precision of my apparatus was probably about 0.2%, in other words I would have been able to measure a change of weight of one part in 500. Not great for lab experiments, but easily attainable with cheap household items.

@Bob Smith: yes, I agree. All COP>1 has to do with thermodynamically open systems. I have been studying Don Smith's work for a long time now, where he talks about how to "disturb ambient" and capture the resulting energy. Frequency and resonance themselves have nothing to do with capturing ambient energy. What matters is the capacitance in the circuit and the e-field around the capacitance while charge is entering the capacitor. But, the inter-turn capacitance of a coil itself can be sufficient for this, so a coil in resonance might show this effect, particularly coils with large capacitance like the Tesla bifilar pancake coil, and the E-TBC. The charge entering the capacitance takes on a radiant/scalar component due to its ambient environment, which then causes overunity in a subsequent transformer stage because the radiant component is not subject to Lenz's law the way that ordinary electricity is. This is the overunity mechanism at work in most (but possibly not all) of Don's devices.

@Sputins: yes, I agree also. It is quite possible there are other ways to affect gravity. I can think of Podkletnov's experiments as one example. But it seems that overunity and antigravity are birds of a feather, and they tend to flock together. Certainly if you could modify gravity you would immediately have overunity: just make a balanced flywheel and then reduce gravity under one half of it. The thing is, the mechanism I am proposing/discussing isn't true "anti" gravity in that it is not modifying the gravitational field in any way. What it is is unbalanced magnetic force resulting in a net thrust vector. To an observer who sees a device levitating it's an esoteric difference, but magnets generating force is not at all unknown science. The only thing that's unusual is that using radiant energy a coil can generate a magnetic thrust without an equal and opposite reaction and that is most certainly unconventional. Like you said, this will most certainly attract the attention of three-letter agencies if it actually works. Essentially what I've discovered (or think I've discovered, at least through thought experiments) is that studying radiant energy gives you a two-for-one special on unconventional technologies: you get both overunity and (quasi) antigravity. They are both manifestations of the same phenomenon. Lenz's law is the electrical analog of Newton's third law. Cancel one, and you have canceled the other as well.

For vehicle applications, I am envisioning something like a quadcopter drone frame, with a central power plant which is a Don Smith/Ed Gray device making "cold" electricity, then transformer "thrusters" on each arm. Some control logic will be needed, something to convert standard RC servo PWM signals into drive signals to feed the cold electricity to the thrusters. Then you could essentially just use a standard off-the-shelf drone autopilot microcontroller and you would have a fully functional reactionless thrust vehicle. One transformer would provide overunity power output from the cold electricity to run the vehicle electronics, and additional thrusters would be needed for yaw control for full 6-axis control. Other than the fact that consumer-grade GPS only works at low speeds and altitudes, such a thing would be space-capable. Space is not the friendliest environment for electronics, due to thermal issues and radiation, but a unit with an aerospace grade GPS and radiation hardened electronics would be capable of low earth orbit at least. With better guidance and nav systems it would be capable of traveling anywhere in the solar system. More on this later, I have done extensive thinking about this idea.

[med.3012]

Frequency and resonance themselves have nothing to do with capturing ambient energy. What matters is the capacitance in the circuit and the e-field around the capacitance while charge is entering the capacitor. But, the inter-turn capacitance of a coil itself can be sufficient for this, so a coil in resonance might show this effect, particularly coils with large capacitance like the Tesla bifilar pancake coil, and the E-TBC. The charge entering the capacitance takes on a radiant/scalar component due to its ambient environment, which then causes overunity in a subsequent transformer stage because the radiant component is not subject to Lenz's law the way that ordinary electricity is. This is the overunity mechanism at work in most (but possibly not all) of Don's devices.

.

the resonance is very important in Don Smith device, in his writings he stated the importance of resonance because we have a true voltage image translated as reactive current ... in the case of ETBC it will see the rotating electric field generated with this huge reactive current and conserve it as static electric charge .. after that the oscillation start naturally free of Lenz' law,.... there's no closed circuit in the ETBC and no time to charge the capacitive side... only electrons spin, the frequency will tell you how much active power replicated from the unreal reactive power, obviously we have a kind of reactive into active transformation.

the device that may show a gravity potential is the mixed ETBC, the difference between electromagnetism and gravity is the difference between the ETBC and the mixed ETBC : the following drawing show the concept of M-ETBC



finally the NGC 1365 galaxy will show some interesting details ....

[Bob Smith]

@Bob Smith: yes, I agree. All COP>1 has to do with thermodynamically open systems. I have been studying Don Smith's work for a long time now, where he talks about how to "disturb ambient" and capture the resulting energy. Frequency and resonance themselves have nothing to do with capturing ambient energy. What matters is the capacitance in the circuit and the e-field around the capacitance while charge is entering the capacitor. But, the inter-turn capacitance of a coil itself can be sufficient for this, so a coil in resonance might show this effect, particularly coils with large capacitance like the Tesla bifilar pancake coil, and the E-TBC. The charge entering the capacitance takes on a radiant/scalar component due to its ambient environment, which then causes overunity in a subsequent transformer stage because the radiant component is not subject to Lenz's law the way that ordinary electricity is. This is the overunity mechanism at work in most (but possibly not all) of Don's devices.

Thanks for the response, Tom.
(I can't believe I'm talking to Tom Swift - my father started me out on the Tom Swift series when I was 11 years old, and I was thoroughly engaged ).

If you're looking for increased capacitance, then it would make sense (to me) to pulse an inductor at a frequency above its self-resonant frequency, where the inductor's reluctance drops below zero and its capacitance begins to rise. Above resonance, the inductor begins to act like a capacitor. Could it be that at this level of pulsation, it begins to interact with the aether in such a way that it can draw in its charge and make it available to the system, essentially driving its COP above 1?
Bob

[tswift]

@med.3012: I have a lot of respect for your research and I will continue to follow it. After much research of my own and digging through many theories of how the Don Smith device works (some from others and some my own), the hypothesis I am trying to put to the test is the one I described, where the capacitance in the circuit acts as a sort of scalar modulator. This is what Don was demonstrating with the handheld Tesla coil zapping the homemade capacitor, with every current pulse is a high voltage pulse surrounding the capacitor. The resonance hypothesis I find unsatisfying for several reasons. First, many experimenters have built standard Tesla coils with a matching resonant receiver. This easily demonstrates one-wire power and power through the ground, but it's not overunity. I have done this test myself and measured it. It can be very efficient, approaching 100% at very close distances, but it's certainly not overunity but itself. Many, many other circuits in standard, well-known electrical engineering use resonance, particularly in RF circuits. Dual-tuned circuits are common in radio receivers, with two resonant circuits tuned to match each other. This works fine for its intended application but it isn't overunity either. Second, I have built the Don Smith device as described, with the L1/L2 coils in very good resonance. Again, the circuit works but it isn't overunity. I don't measure a power gain either at the L2 coil itself, or after rectification, or after the rectifier stage being oscillated through an output transformer. There is something important still missing. It may be that the resonance is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. However, I would also offer as an example Don Smith's "plasma globe" device that consisted of a coil of wire to sit on top of a standard plasma ball toy, like a hat. The coil goes into a bridge rectifier, and then into a cap bank. The coil has no tuning cap across it for resonance. It would have a self-resonant frequency of course, but this would be very high, in the megahertz range most likely. It has no matching resonance whatsoever to the frequency of the flyback driver exciting the plasma globe, and yet somehow this configuration is supposed to produce overunity. What it does have is a capacitance (the cap bank) that is situated physically within the oscillating high-voltage field around the plasma globe, with the pickup coil arranged to deliver current pulses in the proper phase with the voltage pulses. If you examine Don's tabletop device, it likewise has big capacitors situated within an oscillating high-voltage field, with a pickup coil arranged to deliver current pulses in the proper phase. This is the one common theme you will find among all of Don's devices. Even his early patent application document has a big flat capacitor with a plasma tube sticking right through the middle. Again, capacitance placed within an oscillating high voltage field.

In Don's earlier texts and conference talks, I believe he was doing more to obfuscate the real truth. He even stated at one point that the coils are not necessary, but he put them there because people expect to see them there. Later on, Don realized that with his health declining and his dream unrealized, that he had little left to lose by sharing more of the truth. This is when he did the talk and the demonstration with zapping the capacitor.

Bottom line, I don't wish to distract you from your own research and testing your own hypothesis. This is how science works. I could very easily be wrong, and I have changed my opinion numerous times already based on what I have been able to prove (or not) on the bench. All that really matters is that someone, anyone who is willing to share, is able to produce a working device. What form the device takes doesn't really matter to the people of the world who have no electricity. A completely solid-state, maintenance free device would be superior to one with moving parts, but anything that brings real practical energy to the world will do. After considerable reading, I think this is the most likely hypothesis for the Don Smith device and it's what I am actively researching to try to prove or disprove.

@Bob Smith: yes, I wondered if anyone would get the Tom Swift reference. These days youngsters are thinking about Taylor Swift, not Tom Swift. I was raised on them too, and it seemed the most fitting moniker to choose since I am trying to remain anonymous and unknown to those three-letter agencies we mentioned earlier. About the capacitance, it's not the capacitive reactance in ohms we need, just the actual capacitance in Farads, and this is not a function of frequency (excepting perhaps nonlinear dielectric materials). Like I said above, there just isn't any simple "magic" way of pulsing a coil that by itself gives overunity, at least not that I've seen. I have tried personally without positive results, and so have many other experimenters. If overunity were that easy, we'd have it already and it would be well-known. But due to the fact that coils have capacitance, the Don Smith effect might be able to manifest in a coil, most particularly at resonance. I have seen pictures and diagrams for some Don Smith-style overunity devices (most particularly some Russian ones) where there are several coils wound over each other on one linear form. Most likely at least one is a resonant high-voltage coil, operating more or less like a standard Tesla coil. This causes an oscillating high-voltage field around the other coils, and the inter-turn capacitance would pick this up. To manifest overunity, this scalar component then has to go through a transformer, but it's also possible that in a stack of coils like this one or more of the coils is acting like an output transformer. The basic physics at work is the "Don Smith Effect" as described by him in his paper, but it's the capacitance of the resonant coils that pick it up, causing it to look like it's something magical about the resonance itself.

Once I have a fully working Don Smith device, I'll be in a position to know for sure. Until then I'm speculating along with everyone else. I did notice in my last round of testing the resonant coil device (with the standard Don-style L1/L2 coils) that if you zoom way in on the scope time axis, the 1/4 wave ring frequency due to the wire length itself is very prominent. Even though my coils are tuned with parallel caps to 67.5 KHz, when the spark gap fires the wire itself rings with a frequency of 1.33 MHz in this case. Perhaps there really is something to the theory that the wire length of the L1 and L2 coils have to be in a whole number relationship. Certainly just tuning for LC resonance by itself is not enough. Complicating the situation is the fact that the wave travels down the helical coil at something not exactly the speed of light. Eric Dollard has a lot of published research on this, about oscillating current transformers. It depends on a lot of factors including the coil aspect ratio and wire spacing. The traveling wave can be either more than, equal to, or less than the speed of light, so the ringing frequency of the coil will be correspondingly higher or lower than you would expect by just applying the 1/4 wave formula with the speed of light. If you make the primary exactly 1/4 the length of the secondary, for instance, this might or might not give you a resonant match between the two coils' ring frequencies depending on the exact geometry. Fortunately it should be easy to just cut the wire extra long, hit it with the spark, measure the frequency on the scope, and keep trimming bits off until the match is good enough, and this is what I plan to do for my next round of testing.

[med.3012]

@med.3012: I have a lot of respect for your research and I will continue to follow it. After much research of my own and digging through many theories of how the Don Smith device works (some from others and some my own), the hypothesis I am trying to put to the test is the one I described, where the capacitance in the circuit acts as a sort of scalar modulator. This is what Don was demonstrating with the handheld Tesla coil zapping the homemade capacitor, with every current pulse is a high voltage pulse surrounding the capacitor. The resonance hypothesis I find unsatisfying for several reasons. First, many experimenters have built standard Tesla coils with a matching resonant receiver. This easily demonstrates one-wire power and power through the ground, but it's not overunity. I have done this test myself and measured it. It can be very efficient, approaching 100% at very close distances, but it's certainly not overunity but itself. Many, many other circuits in standard, well-known electrical engineering use resonance, particularly in RF circuits. Dual-tuned circuits are common in radio receivers, with two resonant circuits tuned to match each other. This works fine for its intended application but it isn't overunity either. Second, I have built the Don Smith device as described, with the L1/L2 coils in very good resonance. Again, the circuit works but it isn't overunity. I don't measure a power gain either at the L2 coil itself, or after rectification, or after the rectifier stage being oscillated through an output transformer. There is something important still missing. It may be that the resonance is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. However, I would also offer as an example Don Smith's "plasma globe" device that consisted of a coil of wire to sit on top of a standard plasma ball toy, like a hat. The coil goes into a bridge rectifier, and then into a cap bank. The coil has no tuning cap across it for resonance. It would have a self-resonant frequency of course, but this would be very high, in the megahertz range most likely. It has no matching resonance whatsoever to the frequency of the flyback driver exciting the plasma globe, and yet somehow this configuration is supposed to produce overunity. What it does have is a capacitance (the cap bank) that is situated physically within the oscillating high-voltage field around the plasma globe, with the pickup coil arranged to deliver current pulses in the proper phase with the voltage pulses. If you examine Don's tabletop device, it likewise has big capacitors situated within an oscillating high-voltage field, with a pickup coil arranged to deliver current pulses in the proper phase. This is the one common theme you will find among all of Don's devices. Even his early patent application document has a big flat capacitor with a plasma tube sticking right through the middle. Again, capacitance placed within an oscillating high voltage field.

In Don's earlier texts and conference talks, I believe he was doing more to obfuscate the real truth. He even stated at one point that the coils are not necessary, but he put them there because people expect to see them there. Later on, Don realized that with his health declining and his dream unrealized, that he had little left to lose by sharing more of the truth. This is when he did the talk and the demonstration with zapping the capacitor.

Bottom line, I don't wish to distract you from your own research and testing your own hypothesis. This is how science works. I could very easily be wrong, and I have changed my opinion numerous times already based on what I have been able to prove (or not) on the bench. All that really matters is that someone, anyone who is willing to share, is able to produce a working device. What form the device takes doesn't really matter to the people of the world who have no electricity. A completely solid-state, maintenance free device would be superior to one with moving parts, but anything that brings real practical energy to the world will do. After considerable reading, I think this is the most likely hypothesis for the Don Smith device and it's what I am actively researching to try to prove or disprove.

@tswift, mutual respect, i think the best option is to make a team but this remain a dream, in my work i finished the primary coil and it should be the S-ETBC, now i am working in L2 side , precisely in energy balance how to make L2 balanced under load ?

but i have to make at least one test to publish this technique, sometimes the solution is front of our eyes but we can't see it because we expect something else.

it's good to examine different road

[Sputins]

If one experimental goal are antigravity effects, (although I feel the term “antigravity” itself is technically incorrect). Another closely related topic might also be inertia modification.

One approach might be to first construct a list of all known or rumoured anti-gravity devices or principals. See what common links or underlying principals can be determined from this.

There are a whole host of experiments or devices that claim to alter mass or produce so called antigravity.

I think come at the OU idea from the other way. - Find out about methods of rumoured gravity manipulation, which may then lead to OU discoveries, principals or ideas…

Consider - Opposing Coils / Magnets, Vibration, Electrical Charge, Gyroscopic Action, Geometry etc.

Un-countable tons of water are floating in our sky in the form of Clouds…

Gravity itself is a very weak force, but its actions are basically instantaneous.

[tswift]

Oh yes, I have done exactly as you propose. I think I am familiar with many if not most of the purported methods of altering mass and/or inertia that have been claimed or proposed. The trick of course is that details are usually lacking as to actually how to build anything....

And yes, also "antigravity" is a misnomer in the sense I'm applying it here. This would be magnetic repulsion, but producing unequal and unbalanced forces in apparent contravention of Newton's third law. If we knew what it was that the magnets were actually pushing against, then presumably we could rewrite the conservation laws to include a larger symmetry. If the effect can be experimentally produced it would still be hugely useful, but not as useful as truly producing actual gravity on demand. A vehicle accelerating under magnetic thrust would still experience internal stresses and any occupants would feel the acceleration, which would limit the acceleration to what the occupants can handle. But 1G acceleration over a period of 1 year equals a number fairly close to light speed, so even this is enough to reach the near stars.

However, if the William Hooper paper that was posted over in the Figuera device thread holds any truth, then there may be hope of actually manipulating gravity. In it Hooper lays out a fairly coherent argument that gravity itself is nothing but a manifestation of the VxB "motional E-field" which must surround all matter due to moving electrons. Since the VxB field would be radial, it would induce a polarization in surrounding matter due to the field gradient, which would then cause a net attractive force that would obey the inverse square law.