I wonder how accurate you have to hit the target to get the intended consequences.
I think you have to be very accurate with almost any kind of bomb. The soviets made 10+ megaton h bombs partly because they didn't have accurate delivery systems.
France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
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Re: France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
#22Shades of Heinlein's "Harsh Mistress" - launching is easy when you're "uphill" from the earth, and rocks are cheap.
Re: France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
#23Well directed kinetic energy can be devastating and has been used for such effect since ages, for example the old canons with passive cannon balls. Rail guns are their new sought after variants. The famous bunker-busting smart-bombs circa first gulf-war were fin stabilized old tank barrels packed with explosives. It is their weight, owing to the high density metals used in the barrels and their small cross section (a…
>hence extremely high terminal velocity
the main benefit of the small cross section is not increased terminal velocity through the air but rather to maintain velocity through the bunker (or armor in the case of the "sabot" or APFSDS anti-tank round you mention)
Re: France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
#24Soon: imaginary bombs, weighting sqrt(-1) t :)
But then those bombs would be highly susceptible to decay!
Re: France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or to look at it another way: v^2 = u^2 + 2 a s = 0 + 2 x 9.81 x 2,000 = 39,000 KE = 0.5 m v^2 = 0.5 * 300 * 39,000 = 6MJ I.e. about 1kg of TNT. "Crush"?? I'm with you on this one, mmaunder
For another comparison, modern KE sabot anti-tank rounds (what tanks shoot at other tanks) use penetrators weighing from 4 to 8kg, with a muzzle velocity of around 1500m/s, giving a low of end of ~9MJ. Granted, this is ignoring air friction, and must punch through the front armor (much much thicker) than the top armor that bombs go through. Also... as a cost comparison, JDAM (the US GPS guidance) kits cost 20-30k per…
Just a thought, but if the silicon is expensive, could you potentially engineer the majority of the computerized parts into a UAV that could detach at the last moment and fly back?
Re: France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
#26This is an awesome idea. Even if the devices miss, they'll create terror in people thinking about the unexploded bombs.
Re: France Is Dropping Concrete Bombs
#27Wasn't there a military program for dropping metal rods from space? Does this sound at all familiar to anyone?
Kinetic cruise missiles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto