This is the first hover-capable lifter built by Dynamic Electrostatics. It uses 3 x 1.5 g thrust, 1st generation wire collectors. (coil at bottom). The  base emitter-collector design was tested beforehand on a thrust measurement rig and it was determined that it could fly easily before it was even constructed (which proved it). The small collectors work very hard to lift this device and are rather flimsy. But it worked as expected nevertheless.

This device is 25 cm in diameter. It was the first design to lock the coil loops in place, which was necessary to scale it even larger. The foam beams were too flammable and also could not scale larger effectively. This lifter could lift is own power supply wires high enough to make it to the ceiling of the shop (1.8 m). When this one was constructed it was uncertain that the coils could be glued down without bad effect. (It was no problem).

At 91 cm diameter and weighing 69 g, this is currently the largest publicly demonstrated lifter built by Dynamic Electrostatics. It has a maximum lift of 108 g. That is about 178 g/m², making it approximately the 7th strongest  electrostatic lifter ever built (most gross thrust in a large size). This design is not at all optimized and new variants already under construction are expected to be much stronger. This device can hover with only 65-75  W. but requires 317 W to reach the maximum lift (so far).

This design was built to test the effect of a central opening, all-aluminum emitter arrays (two different styles), a new wire size, and a monorail, pressure-fit emitter array attachment design. It is 30 cm in diameter. It has a 5m long collector coil. It has a very short emitter to collector gap of 2.5 to 3.0 cm. This one could lift itself and its power wires to their ends at 1.56 m. The collector coil here is making just over 3 g of thrust per meter.

The Rotation Rig was used to test some small collector designs. A pair of closely matched devices are attached to opposite arms of an armature that is supplied with high voltage DC. Gap adjustments and other tests are tried and the RPM of the rotating armature is recorded and monitored by a laser reflection RPM counter. The rig is 2m in diameter which means that each time one of the armature arm passes a given point 1.0 m has been traversed in that period of time. This is very easy to convert to m/s. Speeds of up to 3.0 m/s were obtained by small 0.5 g thrusters which became the basis of the Paradigm-1 device. This device helped prove that maximum thrust does not necessarily proportional to maximum air outlet speed.

The Fulcrum-Scale Rig literally takes the armature from the Rotation Rig and turns it on its side. The fulcrum is 1:1 and isolates the electric field of the lifter engines from the digital scale which has 0.01 g resolution. It also allows the test thrusters to push up while pushing the scale down. Standard test thrusters are usually 10 cm in diameter but vary considerably. The Paradigm-1 and Paradigm-2 thrusters were attached by a "chopstick" like design to this rig and the thrust output measured. This rig shows that electrostatic thrust is smoothly incremental from zero to peak power.