Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
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Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
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Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#2Pretty soon we’ll just dropping small meteors. Farming them might not be cheap, but we’re not going to run out of them.
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#3I have my doubts. You would have to stop it from orbiting first (8km/s). What kind of rocket would be needed to get 8km/s deceleration of 12 tons on LEO? And it would only gain 10km/s. Why not go directly from the ground then?
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#4There's an economic incentive for the moon base! Since it's so expensive to bring heavy payloads up by rocket we can just mine them on the moon. It surely won't be too long until the US needs to mass-produce the godrods anyway.
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#5I have my doubts. You would have to stop it from orbiting first (8km/s). What kind of rocket would be needed to get 8km/s deceleration of 12 tons on LEO? And it would only gain 10km/s. Why not go directly from the ground then?
It doesn't even take 1km/s to deorbit.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12011/how-could-a-...
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#6The cost thing, they need to do inflation-adjusted dollars. They wrote this bit really badly. The cost of launch as dropped, kg for $, over time. But, also inflation happens so a million $ isn't the big deal it was.
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#7How accurate can it be - or does it only work when there is almost no wind? Also, isn't there a maximum velocity based on air drag - if so, can something similar not be dropped from a plane?
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#8> 20 feet long, 1 foot in diameter tungsten rods
I was curious about the price of this so I did some monster math (FYI complete arms layman, serious errors are likely).
Raw materials: Volume is 15.7 cu ft = 444,574.5 cm3. Density is 19.3g/cm3 = 8,580 kg. Estimated price of $30.3k per metric ton [1] = $260k in tungsten. Cheap.
Now for launch price. SpaceX advertises $90 million for 8 metric tons launched into low-earth orbit [2]. Yowza.
A single Trident submarine based missile is in the order of $65-$100 million depending on various sources. So cost-wise these seem within the same order of magnitude as nukes.
1: https://www.metalary.com/tungsten-price/ 2: https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/spacex-pric...
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#9> 20 feet long, 1 foot in diameter tungsten rods I was curious about the price of this so I did some monster math (FYI complete arms layman, serious errors are likely). Raw materials: Volume is 15.7 cu ft = 444,574.5 cm3. Density is 19.3g/cm3 = 8,580 kg. Estimated price of $30.3k per metric ton [1] = $260k in tungsten. Cheap. Now for launch price. SpaceX advertises $90 million for 8 metric tons launched into low-eart…
That price per ton doesn't include making it in the desired shape, though, right? Tungsten is very tough to work with, so I imagine that'd add significantly to the price, though I've no idea how much.
Re: Air Force 'rods from god' kinetic weapon could hit with nuclear-weapon force
#10How accurate can it be - or does it only work when there is almost no wind? Also, isn't there a maximum velocity based on air drag - if so, can something similar not be dropped from a plane?
Rod-shaped means very little drag. And at the speeds that would produce such an energetic effect, wind isn’t going to cause much drift.