Greg,
I watched all the show segments. Unlike some of the harsher assessments,
I enjoyed it as speculative entertainment. It was never intended to be a
scientific documentary, but it did provide some good technical
information while also maintaining viewer interest and suspense. It
hopefully "sparked" some interest in Tesla and STEM for younger folks.
And, new information may have been uncovered at Tesla's Colorado Springs
site, Wardenclyffe, and from the Tesla Museum documents. Following is s
quick overview of what I gleaned about the coil setup in the finale.
Using some of Tesla's drawings of his "death ray", Aron and his team
made a scale model TC (that also happened to look similar to Electrum) -
a large TC with a spherical topload. They used a large energy discharge
capacitor bank to elevate the DC potential of the TC secondary. The
other end of the bank was connected to the TC grounding system and
a small elevated discharge target. A spiral discharge wire came off the
topload to point the spark in the direction of the grounded terminal.
The capacitor bank was then charged - I think Aron mentioned 100 kJ of
bank energy. A drone was then flown between the topload and the small
grounded discharge terminal, The TC was then briefly fired. This
initiated a long streamer which passed through the drone and connected
to the small grounded terminal.
When the streamer fully connected, heavy follow-through current (from
the discharging capacitor bank) flowed through the TC secondary,
destroying the drone and creating a hot, fiery arc. The resulting flash
and large volume of smoke (and the time delay between the streamer
connecting and drone explosion) suggested that the drone may have been
outfitted with pyrotechnics to add to its explosive destruction.
Except for the drone, it looked to be technically similar to one of the
setups you used in a Survival Research Labs show 20 years ago:
https://www.lod.org/srl-coil.html
Aron could probably provide more technical information about the setup.
Bert