Someone (again
) mentioned floating grounds and electron guns in regard to ME drives so again:
A floating ground is a ground that grounds to something other then earth (or more likely in sci-fi terms a large enough celestial body). A starship's floating ground would be its hull. All this does is balance out the voltages to prevent current from flowing (at least were you don't want it to) thus preventing pretty little lightning jumps that may or may not have the power to do harm depending on their power. Now for ME the charge coming off the drive is enough to melt the hull so it more then enough for it to have been jumping though the air before it gets to that level leading to the theory that a drive can't discharge in use. (In addition to the fact that electron leaving the eezo should make a mass increasing field) If one can't discharge in use the drive charge will build up to unsafe levels after any reasonable amount of use (that is after being used for minutes to an hour), thus one can't ground to the hull or one would damage it. Now if the charge could be removed in use (all evidence points to no) then one might be able to ground to the hull it just needs to take about 3MJ of power per second. Or you could make a special grounding device to act as a floating ground. But good luck on making anything better then the hull! The best thing would be another chunk of eezo, which you might as well use to make the core bigger, which will allow the ship to go longer w/o discharging.
As for particle beams (aka electron guns) some one quoted Atomic Rockets as to why that'd be bad and so here's that bit again:
"Another problem is one shared by ion drives, the "space charge." If you keep shooting off electron beams you will build up a strong positive charge on your ship. At some point the charge will become strong enough to bend the beam. And the moment your ship tries to dock with another it will be similar to scuffing your shoes on the rug and touching the doorknob. Except instead of a tiny spark it will be a huge arc that will blow all your circuit breakers and spot-weld the ships together.
Don't try to neutralize the charge by firing off positively charged proton beams. John Schilling warns that space is filled with an extremely low-density, but conductive, plasma. You try to eject charge from your ship, and the ship itself becomes part of a current loop. Not only is the current flowing through the hull
(or trying to) likely to cause problems, but all those electrons or protons being sucked in produce X-rays on hitting the hull."
linky
In short no you can't eject charge from a ship in space, you go to a nice planet or some sort of discharge facility and do it there were space/physics won't try to murder you.
Well unless the guys I read got their science wrong, anyone who knows more about this stuff see any issues with this?
On the other hand shield upgrades for everyone! Don't forget that shields' eezo core(s) will need to cycle to discharge their own accumulated charges!
