When I was playing with nitrogen lasers, hammering the spark gap with a screwdriver handle produced much better pulses than just letting the voltage increase until sparkoer (once every 10 seconds or so).
I suppose part of the charge went into corona discharge. This will matter less with these huge caps.
When I was in High School, a friend had a "rechargeable cherry bomb". It was something on the order of 200 uFd at 10kV. We'd charge it up and fire it with an ignitron tube through a 1/2" gap. It made one heck of a bang.
The other fun thing was discharging a large HV cap in small containers of water. The resulting shock wave would throw water up in the air and shred the container. This was in the days of metal frozen orange juice cans, which his family would empty every morning at breakfast. When my friend got home from school, he'd shred the day's can with a smaller capacitor (2 uFd @ 20 kV?). The plan was to make a metal sculpture out of the results, but I don't recall that he ever got around to that part.
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