I need to make a correction to my comments on plasma screening here, after a 4am realization that my mental model of what would happen to the potential was in f

I need to make a correction to my comments on plasma screening here, after a 4am realization that my mental model of what would happen to the potential was in fact pretty solidly wrong. That said, I feel like fixing my mistake just leads this proposed dipole drive to fail in a different way. So: It is entirely possible for a negative screening charge to accumulate right next to the positive plate/grid that will completely eliminate the exterior field (and similarly on the other side), and that will not generate the extremely strong field at the edge of the plate that I was imagining in my comment above. Specifically, if the negative screening charge is more or less in the shape of an adjacent parallel plate of plasma (and a positive parallel plate of plasma right next to the negative plate/grid), that will indeed perfectly cancel the field outside. At that point, the most you'd find for the field in between the "plasma plate" and the real one would be a simple parallel plate capacitor field: the same magnitude that was originally expected between the real plates. Because it would only act over a very small distance, this would only lead to a negligibly small change in potential. BUT! In this scenario, you have essentially neutralized both of the original plates: both sides are at roughly zero potential, and the net effect of these "four parallel plates" in the interior region is to have zero field there, so there is no longer any field in the middle to accelerate plasma particles and the drive doesn't work. On the other hand, if you constantly keep pumping charge to maintain the desired potential difference between your original plates/grids, that precisely means that you are not allowing your plates to be fully screened: you get your drive field back in between the plates, but now you're basically back to the unscreened case and it seems that my original objections hold. (I assume that as charge piled up, eventually the narrow fields between the grids and the surrounding plasma would become strong enough that electrons would leak between them, creating an awkward circuit.) And I suspect that any intermediate situation between these two extremes would just interpolate between their two different modes of not working. That said, I am not even remotely an expert on plasma physics. I can't rule out the possibility that there's some fascinating effect in plasma dynamics that would turn the nitty-gritty details of all this into a functioning drive system. But I'm pretty convinced that if it does work, the justification will depend strongly on detailed plasma dynamics: the simple arguments we've been making about how parallel plate capacitors accelerate individual ions (or even individual electron/proton pairs) won't capture the heart of it.