Well, I never tried that kind of setup since I use my variant of 2 coil Litz wire. The theory is that when magnetic field collapses the flux lines of the collapsing field are cutting the surface of the coil (or in this case coils) with tremendous speed and they induce a lot of voltage without much current or in other words a lot of dielectric energy with small amount of electron flow current mixed. Now, by that token there is no reason not to pickup that kind of energy by every coil within the collapsing magnetic field. The problem I see with this concept is the fact that if you use snubber circuit on the energizing coil in order to drain the inductive collapse energy to either one of the primary source poles the induced voltage on the pickup coils is drastically reduced.

At first glance that could mean that there is some definite amount of energy available in the system or that it's possible to drain the inductive collapse energy from the whole coils setup almost completely with power coil shorted. Try the following experiment- put some transil diodes anti-parallel to the semiconductor switch you're using (MOSFET or BJT) and set their trigger voltage to some value above the power source voltage but bellow the voltage of the inductive collapse. You will notice that the transils will heat up quite quickly obviously dissipating the energy of the inductive collapse. The voltage on the pickup coils will plummet to some very low value. So, I would conclude that the collapsing magnetic field flux lines that cut the windings of the pickup coils are not the only reason for the induction of the high voltage spikes. If they were, then the fact that the primary coil is shorted would mean nothing to the pickup coils.

I will now speculate wildly and assert that the primary and most important coupling of the primary coil and pickup coils is not inductive but rather a capacitive one thus allowing the dielectric fields of both coils to be coupled to a degree. Now, if the transil diodes short the primary coil and level the charges (thus effectively killing the dielectric field) the capacitive coupling between coils will allow the transfer of dielectric energy from pickup coil to primary coil thus allowing the shortened primary coil to also sink a dielectric field from the every coil in the setup to which it is capacitively coupled.

I came up with this explanation based on some observations of the behavior of the switched coils not unlike the Bedini one. It's probably flawed but at the moment it serves it's purpose.

What's been bugging me more is what happens to the dielectric energy when it's not sinked anywhere. What I mean is- if one doesn't do anything with the inductive collapse energy (no snubber circuit, no transil diodes, no capacitor charging, not a single closed circuit in the whole setup) what happens to it? I mean I've used MOSFET's capable of handling 1000V on voltage spikes of about 800-900V and if the dielectric energy is not sinked anywhere what happens to it? I checked out that not a single semiconductor is leaking some current and that there are no closed circuits anywhere on the setup (both in primary and pickup coils) and voltage spikes appear as powerful as ever but the energy is not accumulated in any way. So, what happens to the energy of the inductive collapse in open circuit systems? Maybe there is some discharge through the air or there is a dielectric field buildup. One is for sure the energy of the inductive collapse is not being sinked, stored or converted to magnetic field. Any ideas on this one?