Comment by nomel

I thought about doing this when I was playing with lifters a couple decades ago. The idea was that you could ionize the boundary layer, to make it somewhat "self repulsive", to thin it, to try to reduce the skin friction drag [1].

I remember doing some napkin math, and the added weight/power would be a net loss.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_friction_drag