My hope was the - charge on the ring would help focus the arc toward the center axis of the bottle (of course there are also a lot of + charged ions here so this thinking may be flawed from the get go. Anyway, in practice it was very finicky. If the resistance was too low, the arc would just connect from the ring to the base. If it was too high there would be two arcs, one from the cap to the ring and another from the ring to the base. In between there was an area where it seemed to work a bit. However, in this process I kept frying resistors (especially if I made the mistake of shutting off the vacuum before the high voltage transformer to make adjustments).
Above are some 1/4 watt rated resistors that have been fried by the setup.
This configuration worked for a while six 1-watt 1,000 ohm resistors coneccted thru two 1/2 watt 1 mega-ohm resistors in parallel. Until, that is, I forgot and shut down the pump before the transformer, then there was a flash and we lost one of the megaohm resistors.
Above is the best view to illustrate what is happening. There is a long arc from the - cap to the + base, but it is deflected to the side near the ring, but under the optimal condition I could find with a - charge also on the ring, it doesn't exactly reach the ring but continues down the bottle. A secondary smaller arc begins nearby on the ring and joins up with the main current toward the base.
Here is another view where the origin of the secondary arc is more diffuse and spread out along the ring. All in all, it is kind of doing what I wanted but not really.
Things to follow up on are placing the mid-ring outside the glass so it can not arc through the vacuum. Also, a ring of magnets might do the trick.
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