The rods from God’s idea is insane and won’t work.
We had this back when the Russians announced they were going to drop conventional ordinance from space, and everyone pointed out that they would be lucky to hit the right continent, let alone Ukraine. In order to make this actually work, you would have to have an active aiming system. Which you know, is a missile.
It’d be less of a problem if an altitude rail could be set up to deliver the materials to space, but at that point all you’re achieving is making it very obvious what you’re sending into space since all anyone has to do is watch the cargo that’s riding the rail into low gravity orbit
tungsten darts from space sounds relatively sane already. what the boss of russian space agency came up with is putting pallet of FAB series bombs as a payload of an orbital delivery rocket, but instead of putting them at orbit, using it as a giant ballistic missile. take a minute to appreciate how stupid idea is this: at these speeds explosive provides something like 20% of total energy if not less, and you can’t target them really well without good guidance package. if you slow it all down to make aerodynamic guidance easier, you give up the primary advantage which is speed, making it a target for GBAD. all of these bombs would need to survive reentry, and russians don’t have IMX
it’s not rods from god, conventional FOBS, or anything like that. it’s much more stupid: it’s rogozhin trying to make himself relevant again
You could use trajectory, distance, etc like we already do with long range rifle marksmanship but add some crazy sight that does all the math to make it work to avoid being considered a missile. It may end up being as big as one, but that divine sight works on my non existent whiteboards lol
The launch platform can aim it and use math to account for gravity, the atmosphere and all that jazz to hit the target at least close enough. Just like we already do to safely crash/burn up space debris.
No, they can’t. The atmosphere is an unknown state, different temperatures, different densities, different wind directions, none of which can be known ahead of time. That’s why weather forecasting is always approximate. You get a percentage chance that it’ll rain. You don’t get a definite time stamp with 100% accuracy.
We cannot predict atmospheric disturbances to the level necessary to make this a practical system. When they burn up space debris they do it “somewhere over the middle bit of the Atlantic” That’s about the level of definition you get. It’s not accurate at all.
Someone (veritasium?) Already did an episode on this and concluded even at like 500 feet up from ground, without an active guidance system, it’s up to luck to hit within a reasonable distance, IIRC.
Why in the hell would anyone bother though? First you got to launch all that mass into a stable orbit. Then you got to assemble the delivery system with the mass as it’s most definitely too heavy for a single launch. Then you need fuel to deorbit the mass when you launch because things in stable orbits tend to want to stay there. Then you wait for the mass to deorbit because we couldn’t afford to send enough fuel for a rapid deorbit. Also wait to launch till optimal trajectory for your target is achieved and hope that it’s not too far side to side from your orbital path because that means even more fuel to deorbit. Also anyone with a halfway decent telescope sees your weapon just sitting there in orbit not to mention being assembled so now it’s got a massive target painted on it at all times and is an easy casualty of first strike.
Or we could use the icbm’s that are a proven tech, easier to hide though that’s not foolproof, can be made mobile, much much more numerous, easier to protect from attack, much cheaper than launching tons of solid metal into orbit, and can strike anywhere on the globe within an hour.
I mean, launch costs are going down over time. It might make much more sense to put many warheads up with a reusable system like falcon (~3000$/kg) than it does to maintain a fleet of necessarily single-use systems like minuiteman (7,000,000$/~300kg = 23,300$/kg). You might well be able to put four warheads (with an equal mass of de-orbiting propellent into orbit - ~1.7 km/s given solid fuel) for the same cost as one ICBM.
True, but to hit things within the atmosphere it needs high mass and low drag. The ISS re-entering would have high mass but high drag, and most of it would fall apart when entering and be slowed down by drag so the energy gets spread through a long streak on the atmosphere instead of on the target
It depends on the angle really. I would expect it to be dropped from low earth orbit so, unless it’s given some strong retrograde push (also removing most of its energy from orbital velocity), the angle it’d be coming in at would be pretty shallow, so it’d have to go through a lot of atmosphere, so drag is very important.
Meteorite: As may be concluded from the air pressure, the atmosphere’s material is equivalent to about 10 m of water. Since ice has about the same density as water, an ice cube from space travelling at 15 km/s or so must have a length of 10 m to reach the surface of the earth at high speed. A smaller ice cube will be slowed to terminal velocity. A larger ice cube may also be slowed, however, as long as it comes in at a very low angle and thus has to pierce through a lot of atmosphere. An iron meteorite with a length of 1.3 m would punch through the atmosphere; a smaller one would be slowed by the air and fall at terminal velocity to the ground.
talking about tungsten we’re looking at minimum 50cm long darts, however this ignores atmospheric erosion
There has actually been multiple occasions were Russia was caught trying to break that treaty, kind of interesting to think about. The question is if Russia does actually mobilize an orbital nuclear weapon someday like an advanced Sarmat or some kind of space bomber, will the nations of the world act in unison or watch in silence?
Have fun with that existential dread while I work on my laundry.
That would involve building a factory in space. If we’re capable of doing that, creating a kinetic OWP with which to bombard the earth would be small ambition.
Yes. The United States of America is, itself a federated state that also represents the fifty states. It’s why we have a state department and a Secretary of State in the White House.
I’m assuming USKS is willful absurdity. It would be the United Kingdom state, or state of the UK (not to be confused with a UK state of the union speech).
No because each nation within the United Kingdom, in example Ireland, Scottland, England, and Wales is it’s own State and United they form the UK State so it’s the United State Kingdom State.
Just remember, they answered your joke seriously agreeing with it. It’s always gonna be united states state along with atm machine and pin number for me.
I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a retarded-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)
Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.
This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.
Gotta mine them in space, but there’s still a whole host of other issues with the idea including aiming them, having enough stations to deploy them anywhere on the planet in a reasonable amount of time, and the other non-radioactive problems that result from throwing a fuckton of tungsten at terminal velocity into something.
It’s well within the character of the US federal government and the armed forces to go forward with an OWP platform program right now, even despite the risks and ethics concerns, sadly.
Pop scientists routinely mis-represent facts to make warfare seem unappealing and lame, this is due their ‘sense of morality’ (read: crying baby noises).
For example, Carl Sagan warned that operation desert storm would cause a (non)nuclear winter and mass famine in Asia.
A guided road is against treaty as well, say it’s a grey area but it really isn’t.
A rod from space impacting with the presumed force equal to a nuclear bomb is in fact a weapon of mass destruction and the language of the treaty is nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.
It’s worded that way specifically so captured space bound objects can’t be redirected and used as weapons like Heinlein described in the moon is a harsh mistress.
This idea was used in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. They loaded up the cargo containers they were sending to Earth with rocks and used them exactly as dropping a rock on something to destroy it
It is a pretty great book, although it’s a shame that Heinlein spent so much of his time being a douchey libertarian warhawk.
This idea was expanded upon in The Expanse series as well, with the added benefit of using small asteroids and pushing then into highly elliptical orbits designed to hit Earth at random times anywhere from a few weeks to several years later so your Inner System opponents have to spend a huge chunk of their resources watching for them without knowing if/when any other rocks will hit.
It’s funny, because tracking big rocks months/years in advance is what we currently do really well, and iirc we update all trajectories of all known objects orbiting earth at least every 11 days, and the main problem is figuring out which is which when they are maneuverable, not where they are going.
There’s currently about 750 000 things being tracked in earth orbit. The total number of asteroids is about twice that, so without upgrades we can still refresh each object every month, and with active space flight I’d guess that would be done much much more often.
Although, doing the math, enough Epstein drives (guesstimating tens) on a smaller asteroid could yield up to 1 m/s² acceleration, meaning an asteroid could traverse the distance from asteroid belt to earth in about a week.
Well, if the rocks are sufficiently small and plenty as well as stealth coated (or at least painted black) they are still a nuisance with deadly potential.
In The Expanse the group responsible for the attack stole the most advanced stealth coating in the Expanse universe to paint the asteroids, leaving Earth unable to detect them with anything but their most powerful sensors.
It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:
We are not well equipped for space situational awareness in cislunar space
There are many orders of magnitude more volume to observe in cislunar space than in the space below the GEO belt
The previous two bullets mean it’s difficult to find a non cooperative target once you lose it and the precision of any observations is poor. The sheer volume of space that need to be observed makes this issue nearly impossible to fix.
Trajectories in cislunar space are highly chaotic due to multi-body effects. Combine this with poor estimates of position and velocity, and our predictions of the future diverge rapidly from truth when propagating cislunar orbits.
The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.
Sure! AFRL released a document called a primer on cislunar space targeted towards military personnel that does a great job of explaining it in easily understood terms.
KSR did something similar in 2312 where multiple small asteroids were programmed to impact at the same point same time which had the effect of a larger impact thanks to kinetics but undetectable due to being small objects of various origins that would have looked random even if detected
Oh, thanks for reminding me about 2312. I read that one a few years ago when I first discovered that he had written more than just the Mars Trilogy, but I should probably revisit since I sandwiched it between two of the Climate in the Capitol books and clearly I don’t remember it that well.
Science fiction always challenges my suspension of disbelief is when people land on planets to skirmish with conventional weapons instead of, say, throw a big heavy aerodynamic solid rock from space.
In the Expanse series Earth and Mars are at war. They can easily throw rocks and totally destroy the other side. Not just beat them in a war, like totally wipe them out. But Mars knows if they start throwing rocks all bets are off and Earth will wipe them out. Just as Earth knows the same, if they wipe out Mars, Mars will make sure the Earth is destroyed.
It’s an analogy of the current situation we have with nuclear weapons. During the Cold War Russia made sure they could wipe out the US if the US ever tried a first strike and the US made sure they could wipe out Russia if they ever tried something. The Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevented anyone from taking the first step. These days the playing field is a bit more complex, but the same principles hold for now.
Of course in the Expanse there is a third party with nothing to lose that at one point employs such a weapon of mass destruction. But let’s just hope that part isn’t a mirror for reality.
I see you’ve skipped the most advanced detection and targeting systems connected to a network of orbital railguns, and the fact all of that is constantly pointed at Mars in case they launch stealth nukes. Inarocks are not a valid war strategy, and only extreme levels of preparation and corruption allowed a few chunks to hit Earth.
Good sci-fi usually treats this on par with using nuclear weapons (which it kinda is?). In Babylon 5, mass drivers are banned by intergalactic treaty, and when one race uses them anyway it literally bombs their victims back into the stone age, and it’s treated as a horrifying event --one of the character’s defining moments in the show is just him looking on silently in horror.
Kinetic drives are mass drivers. Unless you use some kind of teleportation or space warping for travel, every ship is a weapon of mass destruction. Every old boat is a surprise WMD, every craft a viable nuke with zero preparation.
You can make good reasons or at least plausible ones. 40k has planetary shields. There could be a civil war so neither side might want to destroy the surfaces of each planet and civilians. Battletech has spaceship tech being rare and irreplacable, and there are treaties limiting orbital and nuclear bombardment.
Sometimes the most realistic route just isnt fun though so i can usually look past the contrivances.
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