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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?
I forget what it's called, "slingshot effect" or something, where the earth is fully orbited several times, picking up more and more speed before being launched off on its trajectory. Normally, the trajectory is away from earth, sending a ship to Mars or whatever. Imagine that in reverse, though. Imagine some gigantic chunk of satellite having rockets strapped onto it, refitted to be the precise mass/shape in order to do this.
A lot of asteroid impacts happen this way. They are flying through space, they get caught in a nearby planet's gravity, and they begin gradually closing in on the planet as they orbit. Mass burns off gradually as it orbits, but speed continues to pick up until it actually hits atmosphere- remember, in space there's no "friction" with air, hence absurd speeds are possible even with truly massive objects. By the time the asteroid exits the upper atmosphere and comes screaming at the earth, the vast majority of its mass has burned off... but it doesn't need to be much bigger than a car if it's traveling fast enough to hit a planet and cause a fucking nuclear ice age. See: dinosaurs.
As with all space shit, it's not easy or simple, and there are so many thousands of variables to consider in each calculation being made. This is why it's frankly astonishing that we were able to supposedly land men on the moon using old as fuck computers, but we are unable to do so again with supreme ease using all of the new shit we have at our disposal. This is why some people think space is fake and gay.
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