#6158
Lerner
Participant

Actually, what counts for thrust is momentum change, not energy alone, so if you impart the energy to a greater mass, you can get greater thrust.
Can’t remember the exact figures, but I’ll leave it to you guys to calculate the thrust–it is not high:
beam energy per pulse 10kJ
beam velocity 1.6 x10^4km/sec
pulse rate–500 Hz
You would need many DPFs for substantial thrust but in theory 250 sets of elcetrodes could be fed from a single set of capacitors.