Ionisation Q.

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Sietze by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <s.van.de.burgt-at-hccnet.nl>

Hi there all you technologie wizzards (and others),
 
Some time ago I was watching the discovery channel and there was some French
person who used some kind of laser to make an ionised channel through wich
lightning was diverted from it's original path, alway's taking the easy way
down. He called it lightning protection. He also mentioned it was possibel to
drain the lightning out of a thunder cloud but you needed a very powerful laser
for that. I figured would it be possibel to use some kind of inverted Tesla
coil to pick up this energy; store the energy for a while and after that use
the same coil to transmit the energy again on an other frequency.
If one would like to try this: how powerfull exactly does a laser need to be to
ionise the air enough to form a channel for lightning to come down? And how
much laserpower is involved in draining a cloud from lightning?
 
Hope I didn't ask an impossible Q again.
 
greetings from Holland from a guy named:
Sietze