The original note, as written at the time
IMPROVED AIR POLARIZATION VESSELS. In the original idea of air polarization, the flying craft needed special devices all over its body to capture and expand a bubble of air using an electromagnetic field, so the vessel could float. Given the constraints of the shape of such a craft and the possible limitation of resources able to create these special polarizers, a vessel with upward arching wings would be better.
Ongoing development
An improved air polarisation vessel: instead of special devices distributed all over the craft’s body to capture and expand a bubble of air with an electromagnetic field, a vessel with upward-arching wings.
The improvement is a move from distributed engineering to geometry, and that is the right direction. Every polariser on a hull is a failure point, a power draw and a manufacturing constraint on the shape. Put the function in the form and the machine gets simpler.
Arching the wings upward does something specific: it gives the field a natural boundary to work against, and it holds the expanded air under a shaped canopy rather than trying to inflate a sphere around an arbitrary body. A wing is a surface, and a surface is what a bubble needs.
The consequence for the vehicle is that it starts to look like a bird rather than a brick, which matters because the alternative — a box held up by field generators — has no graceful failure mode. A craft with lift surfaces can glide if the field dies.
The constraint is the field strength needed at the wingtips, where the curvature is highest, and that is where any prototype will fail first.
The principle generalises: when a technology is expensive, shape the vehicle so the technology has less to do. We forget this because the technology is the interesting part.
Build the wing, then make the field small.