Steve McConner wrote ...

Well, with all due respect, Steve hasn't built anything quite that big yet! So he hasn't actually showed that the DRSSTC will scale to Lightning Foundry size. The problem is that as you scale up the size, you need to scale the DC bus voltage too. That can only scale so far because of the difficulty of stacking IGBTs in series, so the number of primary turns gets fewer, and eventually you'll reach a point where it's less than 1, even with the finest 3.3kV IGBTs and a 2kV DC bus. (Edit: Looks like the Lightning Foundry is using 4.5kV parts)

However, seeing as his Gigantor will make maybe a 25 foot spark, I think it outperforms Greg's scale models easily. And, as the thing gets bigger its resonant frequency keeps going down, you get to a point where you can use GTO thyristors instead of IGBTs, and those come in really big voltage and current ratings.

If I were a venture capitalist I would give the money to Arc Attack instead.

If you search the TCML archives, you should find some 10 year old posts from me, Steve and Jimmy, poking fun at Greg Leyh for using the OLTC technology.