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can park a GPS guided concrete telephone pole right in your back pocket
Anyone reading this should know that ol BulletStopper is not being hyperbolic. There is already a weapons system nicknamed "Rods from God", which is essentially a satellite armed with several telephone pole-sized tungsten rods. When deployed, they can hit a target AS SMALL AS A DIME FROM FUCKING ORBIT. And the blast is enormous, IIRC, the energy from the blast is similar to one of the bombs we dropped on the Japs, but there's no radiation.
Cinetic weapon...
K
An orbiting tungsten rod is also a method of making an accompanying fission device into an X ray laser death beam. Other materials will lase, but solid tungsten is liable to make for a much longer duration effect since it won't immediately vaporize like zinc would.
Orbital weaponry is nightmare fuel. Familiar with Warhammer 40k? With the Space Marines?
They deploy "Exterminatus" upon condemned planets. This involves first bombarding the planet from orbit with "virus bombs", dirty bombs carrying a multitude of pathogens and corrosive substances. The virus called "Life Eater" causes rapid putrefaction after infection, leading to a horrific death via rapid decay and flesh-eating substances melting any organic things. An entire planet's surface worth of decaying gasses begin to fill the atmosphere, choking it and permeating the virus (which burns out rather quickly) into underground shelters and even the most fortified, well-protected, nuke-proof structures.
Gasses are allowed to build up to a certain point, where a ship in orbit now fires a single "lance" beam weapon at the planet; this "lance" is hot enough that it ignites a firestorm in the upper atmosphere, which quickly reacts with all of the gasses released from decay. The result is a planet that is reduced to ashes and glass, possibly seismically unstable and devoid of all life, eventually crumbling and shaking apart.
That's pretty over the top. But what isn't over the top, is launching an object into space that will orbit the planet several times and then come down and strike somewhere. Fucking dinosaur extinction type event, sky is blacked out with dust, thousands of miles around the impact completely flattened. This could actually happen accidentally with a variety of shit that's up in orbit right now, along with "space junk". Of course, a simiar outcome could be achieved with enough nuclear weapons. Just something more terrifying about the notion of being blasted from space to me.
This could actually happen accidentally with a variety of shit that's up in orbit right now
How could something dropped from orbit have more energy once it reaches the surface than we put into it with rockets to get it there?
https://infogalactic.com/info/Kinetic_bombardment
An interesting thing happens when objects reach or exceed Mach 10. Their kinetic energy becomes roughly equal to the same explosive energy contained by an equal mass of high explosives.
To try and put this into a context, the M829A3 depleted uranium rod penetrator fired from the 120mm L/44 M256A1 smoothbore gun on the M1 tank has a total mass of 22.3 kg (49 lb) and leaves the muzzle at a velocity of 1,555 m/s (5,100 ft/s). Not quite Mach 5. This still concentrates about 1,000,000 joules of kinetic energy onto an area about the size of a quarter. It's not a "death-ray", but it will do until the death-ray gets here.
During the second Iraq war, we were guiding 500lb practice bombs that were essentially a big hollow steel case filled with concrete, with a laser guidance package installed. Dropped from 15,000 ft AGL, they could be guided to a precise impact on the top of the turret of a tank parked right next to a school or hospital, penetrate all the way through, killing the crew and destroying the vehicle, and the people in the building right next to it would hear a sound like the worlds biggest hammer hitting the worlds biggest anvil.
And during it's landing approach the space shuttle would reach speeds in excess of Mach 25.
No... It is called "The hammer of the gods"...
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