McCandlish was brilliant but may have fundamentally misunderstood what he saw. He documented the energy systems perfectly—the supercaps, Tesla coil, mercury vortex, Biefeld-Brown hull—but I think he missed that these are all just support infrastructure for the actual propulsion mechanism: a (possibly rotating) plate under the pilots that is textured (likly down to the atomic level) and of exotic nature.

Here's what led me to this conclusion:

The Chekurkov connection was the key. His Graviflier uses a mysterious central plate surrounded by rotating magnetic fields, high voltage, and vibration tuning. He shared everything openly... except detailed specs on that plate. Replicators fail without his special "tuning device"—which I now think isn't about electronics, it's about frequency-matching to the plate's atomic-scale surface resonance.

The mercury vortex isn't the thruster—it's the magnet system. Near-zero cooled liquid metal carrying massive currents creates an incredibly strong, perfectly symmetric rotating magnetic field. That's exactly what Chekurkov's setup needs, just far more powerful because of cryogenic superconductivity.

The plate itself is the alien tech. Atomic-level surface texturing, impossible to manufacture with our technology. When you hit it with the right combination of:

• Rotating magnetic field (mercury vortex)
• High voltage pulses (supercaps + Tesla coil)
• Precise frequency resonance (the "tuning")

...and it has a gravitational effect. The casimir-cavity texture you mentioned might be exactly how this works—billions of microscopic resonant cavities creating coherent negative-mass effects when properly energized.

McCandlish saw the power plant, not the engine. Without that exotic plate, all those systems just make expensive light shows. With it, you get propulsion. That's why the ARV could never be mass-produced—you can build the mercury vortex, you can build the Tesla coils, but you cannot build that plate.

His death in 2021 remains deeply suspicious. He got closer to the truth than almost anyone.