I recently acquired 6 F40T12 4 lamp troffers and hung two of them in the wood shop and the other two in a lean-to where lumber is stored. The fixtures are kind of hit and miss in the starting department. Thankfully the other lights in the shop are program start F54T5 fixtures and an F96T12 slimline fixture. Those fire up every time as long as electricity is present. The F40 troffers often needed for me to run my hands along the lamps to get them to ignite. Line voltage to the fixtures was about 122 and they were solidly grounded. I was thinking I might need to go electronic in the ballast department. In cool, dry conditions they fire up every time. In warm, humid conditions, they have issues. Thinking about the instructions on magnetic RS ballasts to “mount lamps within 1/2 in of grounded metal reflector,” I got the aluminum foil idea. What if the “metal reflector” was right up on the lamps? So I taped aluminum foil to the lamps in the fixtures in the lean-to along their entire length. Now those fixtures fire up every time.

Well, that is, what some makers made on certain lamp types in the first place: Make a narrow conductive stripe along the tube and connect it to one end via a safety resistor. For the starting aid purpose, the resistor acts as just as a conductor because of the very tiny currents involved, but at the same time it safely limits the current to a safe level (below 1mA with the highest allowed ignition voltage present at the end where it is connected) if someone touches that stripe, so there is no electrocution risk from it.
Some makers use internal conductive coating (so there is nothing functional on the tube outer surface to be accidently rubbed off,...).

But it is true lamps designed with programmed start HF ballasts in mind usually have no explicite design feature aiding the ignition, instead rely on the shear brute force high voltage of the ballast ignition burst. It even went so far to release lamps really difficult to ignite, so really requiring these high ignition voltage ballasts (the thin, long T5HO,...; because the same thin and long shape helps to reach the higher efficacy of these designs).

The fixtures with starting issues were standard F40T12 RS magnetic fixtures. I remember U-bent F40T12’s had that metal stripe on them. Linear F40T12’s don’t have the metal stripe. So the aluminum foil is my homemade metal starting stripe. 😂

Try EMI tape, it's Aluminum foil in the form of adhesive tape

Try EMI tape, it's Aluminum foil in the form of adhesive tape

My version of a redneck starting aid would be a piece of copper wire wrapped around the tube and a tube guard over all that.

Starting aids like that work by capacitance, so might need some surface area

Where do you get EMI tape? I used aluminum foil because if was readily available and free. 😂