I never really understood his insistence on the “ion drive” thing. An ion drive works by hurling ions out at great speed, in a collimated beam, to provide thrust. If a spaceship is hovering over the ground using an ion drive, it’s throwing out enough ions to provide thrust equal to its weight. That’s literally what a rocket is.
Rockets can use compressed nitrogen, water (like the fun pump-up water rocket toys), combustion products (i.e., the vast majority of rockets), charged particles (like ion drives), plasma (like VASIMR), or anything else that throws stuff in the opposite of the direction you want to go. If you mount Ma Deuce in the back of your spaceship and pull the trigger, you would have the Fifty Caliber Machine Gun Drive.
Ion drives are low-thrust and high-efficiency by nature, and are excellent for interplanetary applications that can accommodate leisurely maneuvers. You could build something to let you maneuver down near the ground, but it would be as inconspicuous as Thor whirling Mjolnir to smite his homicidal elder sister. And it would make a mess of anything it was hovering over.
That’s the inescapable physical nature of how it works. Ion drives aren’t magic, which is why I suggested to the OP that he invoke something like antigravity, which could accommodate his observations rather than contradict them. But he wasn’t willing to learn. Pity.
