Rods of God: Futuristic or Primitive Technology

a reply to: Stevenmonet

I have ever heard of. A little over 5,500 eggs could cover 1 square mile with one egg per sqft.

Double check you math. It would actually take 27.8 million eggs to put one egg in each square foot in a square mile.

a reply to: butcherguy

Yeah me no math. That was cost on one mile strip one foot wide. Not one square mile sowwy.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: 1947boomer

And then you're running into the issues of ASAT weapons, and counter defenses, and more and more costs. The only real advantage it gives you is speed. A conventional missile, or aircraft, gets you many of the same effects, just takes longer to get to the target. It becomes six of one, half a dozen of the other. The number of times you have to hit a target that fast are going to be few and far between.

Just to be the Devil's advocate:

These would be placed in low orbits to minimize launch costs per round, to minimize alert time to target, and to maximize accuracy. Too low to directly reach strategic orbiting assets of adversaries. Besides, they would shoot down, not up. I think a system could be designed to verifiably avoid violating existing space weapons treaties.

Certainly any target that could be destroyed by these impactors could also be destroyed by conventional missiles or bombs. The goal of a system like this would not be to replace all the ships and planes we already have in the arsenal for conventional strikes. The goal would be to provide a system to go after a small number of strategically important targets that can't realistically be done any other way and where speed is highly valued. For example, you could have a system specifically targeted at North Korea's missile launch sites. If they go on alert, they could all be neutralized on the ground in 10 minutes. I don't think you could do that with conventional weapons fast enough and there realistically could not be any counter to that in the foreseeable future. The only counter would be for them to build more missiles, but it will be easier for us to build more impactors. I think they would lose that battle, on cost. We currently don't have any nuclear threat limitation treaties with North Korea. A system like this could potentially do to them what the SDI program did to the Soviet Union and force them into a treaty.

Part of me thinks that we are primitive because we have trouble putting a giant nail gun in orbit. Part of me thinks we are better off without it.

a reply to: 1947boomer

There's no issue with existing space weapons treaties, because they're not considered WMDs. There are a few cases where speed could be useful, but probably 99% of the time you're not going to need to hit anything that fast, and a sub with VLS, or a bomber from one of the BTFs will be able to do the same job. It's a niche weapon that we're not going to need enough to spend the kind of money it would require.

originally posted by: Stevenmonet
Eggs. Simple raw eggs. Dropped from 5,000-30,000 feet. Spread over agricultural and residential centers.

Impact damage ok, but the after effects will render the effected areas untenable for years.

All sorts of nasty biological organisms come out to play when rotten eggs are spread across a broad area.

A farmer with a large chicken coup and a pilots license could render a small city uninhabitable for years relatively simply.

This has been known to the united states government since the 60's, at least that is what was claimed by the person who told me he ran the studies.

Good luck finding the info online. I have tried, but have yet to find any mention of the studies he claimed the dod performed.

The way he told it though, it results in near complete biological chaos and destruction within residential and agricultural centers with little to no mitigation possible.

Pretty much have to burn the whole area or wait a few years after nature reclaims it and hope for the best.

He described near biblical plague levels of insects, rodents, and snakes swarming an arra within weeks.

I saw the footage of the spiders and snakes in Australia durring the recent flooding, and his descriptions of a post high altitude egg drop sprang to mind.

Heaven help us if what he said was true and anyone ever decides to use the ultimate cost effective "lazy dog bomb"

I have ever heard of. A little over 5,500 eggs could cover 1 square mile with one egg per sqft.

That is about $600-700 bucks in eggs a pilots license and a simple dispersion apparatus he described but I will not describe here.

Truly scary stuff and quite frugal.

Crude, but the parts will get cheap.

a reply to: Stevenmonet

The dispersion method is a water balloon launcher isn't it? I know it is, I have seen it's efficacy lol.

originally posted by: Stevenmonet
a reply to: butcherguy

Yeah me no math. That was cost on one mile strip one foot wide. Not one square mile sowwy.

I just wanted to let you know before you started buying eggs.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
What makes this impractical is the cost of getting the rods into orbit. This would change if one of two things happens.

Since when does America care about the price tag haha

originally posted by: ANNED
As for Rods from God they don't have to be solid tungsten rods they could be nickel iron rods with a nose cone heat shield and fins of tungsten making the impact site look like it was hit by a meteorite from space.

Hmm, that's quite a good idea...Have you tried contacting Raytheon? Haha, really, I like that idea better. Make it look like a meteor.

I like that everyone mentioned space debris being utilized. Considering they made these systems and satellites/trash with heat resistant materials, they could do just as good as the Tungsten rods I would assume. Maybe the only difference would be the density and there-fore it's kinetic energy, but I doubt getting hit with a trash rocket booster from space would feel any better (and leave less of a footprint) haha

Love the intelligent conversations fostered here at ATS Wish I could respond to everyone but there's just to much bright ideas, like using eggs as a bio-weapon

The one thing I really like about this weapon system though is that it could penetrate nuclear bunkers without chemical/nuclear energy, purely kinetic. Like a bunker buster but better and more destructive...from what I've come to figure out from what I read about it. I could be over estimating it's power though, after all it's technically still a prototype and thus I can't relate it to real world situations where it's been used in that capacity...

originally posted by: J1mmyNeutron
Not sure if this has been posted before, I did a search and hadn't come up with anything.

Anyway, if it is, redirect and delete please

This may be known to some, new to others, but there's a hypothetical military armament designed to be used in outer space that uses assisted gravity to 'drop' solid tungsten rods from space, that reach Mach 5 speeds and have enough kinetic energy to destroy an underground nuclear bunker.

Tungsten for its strength and ability to withstand the air pressure upon re-entry into Earths atmosphere.

The below article mentions these kinetic bombs have the same destructive power as a nuclear bomb.

Actually, a very primitive technology, these kinetic bombs are usually called 'Lazy Dog' bombs. They were utilized in many modern wars. Simple steel balls with spikes attached, dropped from Zepplins, buildings or airplanes.

www.businessinsider.com...

This type of weaponry is standard fare in sci-fi/fiction novels. Neal Stephonson incorporated these 'tungsten space rods' in a few of his books.

These are not 'precision' armaments; they would end up inflicting a lot of damage in the surrounding areas of the target. Anything with enough density to be intact on re-entry is going to be a real S.O.B. to lift into orbit, and it's not going to be easily guided once it's in the atmosphere.

I don't view these as viable weapons (precision instruments of war intended to wipe out a specific target) for Earth's geopolitical situation. This is something more like, an invading force shows up at a planet with known hostiles, refines the rods from raw materials (i.e. asteroids) in orbit, and lobs them haphazardly down onto the planet surface, with the intention of indiscriminately wiping out everything on the surface. Which, in other words, is the stuff of science fiction and not reality.

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

i wonder if you could harvest old rocket parts in space to make impactors for a 'brilliant pebbles' thing or a "RFG' thing



i cam imagine a small robotic craft with a arm and electric propulsion and a furnace/mold set up to gather the engine bells and parts from turbo pumps and turn them in to an amorphous blob/asteroid


eta: mass is mass and if whoever could melt down old docket parts into a pointyish conglomerate would still be just as effective and the mass is already up there

Picked this analysis somewhere on the web

"The claims that these things pack the punch of nukes is exaggerated to the point of being outright lies. They would hit the ground at less than orbital velocity (how much less is down to trajectory options... if you slow it down only a little bit to get it to de-orbit, it will hit the ground at a relatively shallow angle; if you drop it straight down, then you had to have dumped most of the orbital velocity). LEO circular orbit velocity is about 7,800 m/sec. The density of tungsten is 19.3 grams/cubic centimeter. So a rod 20 cm in diameter and ten meters long would have a volume of 3.14159*(10^2)*1000 = 314,159 cubic cm => 6,063 kg. Having six metric tons whack you upside the head at 7.8 km/sec would be harsh, but is it nuke-like? The kinetic energy is 1/2 M*V^2 = .5* 6063 * 7800^2 = 184,436,460,000 joules (184.4 gigajoules). One metric ton of TNT releases 4.184 gigajoules, so this six-ton rod has the equivalent yield of 44.1 metric tons of TNT, a multiple of 7.35"

No nuke power!

a reply to: BerkshireEntity

No railguns aren't going on navy ships, no they don't shoot 3 or 4 foot rods that can fly further than a missile and one shot a battleship...

Matter of fact, fy22 budget completely zeroed out the funding for railgun r&d because railguns are a collosal waste of time and money and have been "5-10 years from fielding" since just after world war 1. Seriously, look it up there's a modern mechanix article from 1924 or 1927 about railguns.

a reply to: roguetechie

hey everything eletric was super cool than

a reply to: butcherguy

True enough, but the technique is as ancient as man himself.

Drop something onto someone that has sufficient mass, and or velocity, and bad things happen to that "someone".

novel 'Footfall'
about intelligent elephant people invading Earth
they used 'kinetic weapons' to bombard us
they'd grab nearby asteroids and drop them on us.

effective.

a reply to: ElGoobero

I remember that one.

It was a good book. Humanity, of course, triumphs in the end.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thunderwells would be cool too

Dig a deep shaft, put a nuke at the bottom , fill it with water. put a steel cover over the shaft, place boulders on top

When you light off the nuke it boils the water into steam, which violently expands

Propels the rocks on top to escape ,velocity ........

Anything in the way gets crushed

Heard about it in context of taking out orbiting alien spaceship (think Independence Day movie)

Unable to take out aliens using conventional weapons dig series of Thunder wells across Middle of USA to trash alien mother ships