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Shooting wires into clouds.. sort of a high-tech Ben Franklin trick. But now I'm remembering a similar story where they (allegedly) attempted to create an IED zapper utilizing similar principles. (I notice the Ionatron link is defunct now; $30 million down the toilet.)
Yeah--in a way, a wire-trailing rocket isn't too different to a wire-trailing dart from a Taser weapon. An actual lightning gun would be awesome for numerous purposes, but alas, the days of real-life ray-guns seem far off at best. The trick with beating an IED though is knowing that it's there--unless they planned to just shoot every piece of road-side debris. But if an IED were hidden inside a car or something metallic, it's hard to see how the weapon would achieve the desired effect.
Naw, I still want the job shooting rockets into clouds with Metallica blaring in the background--Unleashing the power of the Gods!
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Heavy metal thunder!
I remember seeing something on discovery channel many years ago about a team of researchers who would launch a model rocket trailing a thin wire from a high peak into the frequent thunderstorms that would pass by the location. It was, I have to say, probably the coolest job imaginable; here were these grad students, sitting in a lab on top of a mountain in a thunderstorm, blasting away heavy metal music on the stereo--and when the time is right, someone would hammer down a large red button and launch a rocket into the clouds, calling the lightning from the sky... The wires would trail down into buckets of sand, allowing them to study the coral-like patterns of glass melted into them by the lightning strikes.
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