(I’m sorry - I had to take the “e” out of spares to make it spars.)

My questions exactly!

> On Oct 25, 2015, at 5:23 PM, Mike Crawford mcrawf@nuomo.com [harryproa] <harryproa@yahoogroups.com.au> wrote:
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>
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> <<Yeah, I’m an engineer, bo no one truly understands all the mechanisms of lightning>>
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> I've been asking insurance companies, thinking that their huge pool of data might be a help, but they don't take a stand on whether or not lightning protection helps.

God forbid; there may be a hidden liability there ;-)

Same question applies to the “Brillo Pad” school of charge dissipation - does that also make a mast a more attractive strike point?

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> I get that if you get struck, and you have an aluminum mast, it's great to have a huge cable that will direct the charge through the boat and into the water. That's better than blowing a huge hole in the hull.
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> But does that make the boat more likely to get hit because that tall mast is now grounded?
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> More importantly, what about carbon fiber masts? The equivalent is probably to have a 0 gauge cable running the length of the mast, and then somehow into the water, but that sounds like a huge amount of weight aloft.
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>

What we need is a material of huge dielectric constant with which we can wrap the base of the mast, up past the cabintop. The top materials today are in the range of 20000x that of air; an inch (how about PbMgNbO3+PbTiO3 ?) of these would be like 500m of air. Could also turn your mast into one hell of a capacitor, but undoubtedly not enough contain even a small fraction of a lightning bolt.

But the possibilities! ;-)

> - Mike
>

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