Rod of God: Space Weapons

it will probably slow down to terminal velocity at impact desu, so not much

mantle is only 100-200 km down over land, less over sea, but your point remains.

To get an understanding of how the weapon is so powerful, the object isn't 'fired' as much as it is dropped (in actuality, it is a deceleration).
To put it in perspective, orbital velocity is 3.7km/s. This is reduced until it intersects with the target, and the rod then accelerates towards the ground for around 35,000km.
The end result is essentially a massive bullet with a fuckton of velocity.

>To put it in perspective, orbital velocity is 3.7km/s. This is reduced until it intersects with the target, and the rod then accelerates towards the ground for around 35,000km.
Wouldn't it stop accelerating when it reaches terminal velocity?

You just came from The Hawiking Thread and lost the plot/faith in humanity too huh?

> tnt force

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That means it would be piss easy to intercept too

It is extremely aerodynamic and dense for its mass. Its terminal velocity will only be slightly less than velocity in vacuum and it will pass through most reinforced armor/rock/concrete like butter. A telephone pole sized rod of tungsten will basically burry itself completely into a telephone pole high block of tungsten.. It will penetrate significantly further as the density of the material it hits decreases.. So long as it is accurate it will penetrate basically any bunker. It could hit a target in a mineshaft

Only if you have antigravity beam projectors.

How would you defend from that kinda shit?

>3,500 meters per second
This is pointless, since the rod alreay has ~8-something km/s worth of reentry velocity by the virtue of being in orbit.
A tungsten telephone pole-sized rod would be like 50 tons so you'd get a good ~400 tons of TNT equivalent. Since it'll transfer most of it's energy to the ground, it's only practical as a quick reaction bunker buster.
It'll still be economically unsound, though, because you'd need a heavy launch vehicle like the falcon heavy (90$ million per rod) or the SLS (250$ million per rod) to get them to space. You can deliver 50-100 modern cruise missiles on target for that price.

>3.7km/s
Isn't it more than twice that and thats for puny leo (elliptical from higher orbit is even more)?

What if you had this?

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how much of a sitting duck woud your "space cannon" be?
man-pads regularly bring down million dollar jet planes.

It's not one but many in polar orbit. Ultimately no less vulnerable than conventional icbm silos.

As far as the math is concerned yes but what are you planning on intercepting it with that doesnt just get shredded the instant it comes into contact with no relevant change in the weapons trajectory?

Directly, you dont as of right now. Indirectly, you dont build centralized targets of opportunity or you hide the location of your assets extremely well. Otherwise you are looking at trying to destroy the platform it is dropped from.

SDI was never built because pro-soviet retards and ultimately cost.

Lets see how V2.0 turns out.

>You can deliver 50-100 modern cruise missiles on target for that price.
only if you want every nation on earth to fuck you over for putting missiles in space

Oh no, I'm being "fucked over" by Lichtenstein, The Gambia, and Portugal. Whatever will I do.

No, I meant deliver them on target +launch costs terrestrially

Our "workable" atmosphere is, for all intents and purposes, extremely thin. if you dropped the rod from geosynchronous, it would be traveling so fast it would effectively ignore the atmosphere.

Plus, the you act as if the atmosphere is some unmovable object. it's a compressible fluid - it really doesn't shed energy as fast as most people would like to believe. consider that the space shuttle and other orbital pods had to take an extremely slanted course into the atmosphere to shed enough energy to be "survivable." heat aside, if you had piloted the space shuttle from LEO on an extremely steep decent, you would have slammed into the ground at several times the speed of sound.

>How much damage would a telephone-sized rod of tungsten deal to the Earth if it's fired at 3,500 meters per second at us from orbit? I am a brainlet who can't into converting into tnt force.

Force = Mass * Velocity

Force = Newtons
Mass = Kilograms
Velocity = Meters per second.

You have 3,500 meters per second there as the velocity, so let's calculate how much mass a telephone pole sized tungsten rod has:

A telephone pole is roughly 35 feet high, with a circumference of about 45 inches, giving us a radius of about 7 inches.

Now, 35 feet is about 1066.8 centimeters, and 7 inches is about 17.78 centimeters.

So, the total volume of a telephone pole is:

( Pi * 17.78^2 ) * 1066.8

Which is 1,059,488 cubic centimeters.

The density of tungsten is 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter, giving us a total mass of 20,448,118 grams, OR, 20,448 kilograms (roughly 20 metric tons)

So, now that we have the mass and the velocity, we can obtain the force: 71,568,000 newtons.

Now, since a "Ton" of tnt equivalent is approx 4.184 gigajoules (4,184,000,000 joules)

The tungsten rod would impact with a force of about 1/100th of a megaton (approx 10,000 tons tnt equivilant)

>Now, since a "MEGA*Ton" of tnt equivalent is approx 4.184 gigajoules (4,184,000,000 joules)

fixed that for myself.

>The tungsten rod would impact with a force of about 1/100th of a megaton (approx 10,000 tons tnt equivilant)

Actually that's somewhere between 1/100th and 1/50th of a megaton.

back of the envelope, you know.

I'm getting different number here. I'm running basic kinetic energy on your numbers of 20,000 Kg. and 3500 m/s and I'm barely getting 30 tons of TNT.

it also isn't correct in the sense that 3.5 km/sec is a bullshit number. I know that comes from OP, not you, but i'm just putting it out there. .

LEO is over twice that. maybe if you "dropped" a rod from an active support structure like an orbital ring, that could make sense depending on radius of ring, but if you fired the rod from LEO, KE of orbit would put you about 4 times and some higher. that would put your figure much closer.

if you used a satellite, you would really want to drop it from Geosynch. that gives your satellite near impunity from existing ballistic anti-satellite weapons, and lets you sit exactly where you want to sit to drop shit on your enemy exactly when you want to.

This gives you all the KE of geosynch - more or less, not exactly because of any maneuvering you would need to perform to break orbit and make your path sufficiently elliptical to impact earth, but fuck it, let's say your initial V is Geosynch - at a velocity of 3.07 km/sec and a rod mass of 21,000 Kg, you get 99.0 Billion Joules. That's really nothing compared to the amount of energy you gain just by falling. the amount of potential energy released by falling from geosynchronous is 1.115 Trillion Joules. with the kinetic energy from your initial orbit you get out about 1.21 Trillion Joules of energy and you end up with a nice square tonnage of about 290 tons of TNT.

In "real world" terms, this is almost exactly 2% of the yield of Hiroshima.

versus conventional yields, the "Father of all Bombs" thermobaric device that Russia recently dropped in the middle east pulls a yield of about 44 tons of TNT, roughly 1/7th of our rod from geosynch. Cost to get the rod to orbit Vs. cost of the FOAB? not even worth mentioning.

How small can you go before the atmosphere eats the velocity? Big rods are useful for critical infrastructure but smaller ones could go to smaller targets - tank columns and so on.

depends on impact obliquity, speed, etc. etc.

You fucking retarded?
Mass * Velocity is momentum not force, then you calculated the momentum, calling it force and then you compared the momentum to joules, which are different units, and don't have to do much with each other, no wonder the other guy got a much different number, you should leave /sci you brainlet

t. BFR meme

It would take hours for a rod dropped from geosynchronous to reach the surface, pretty much defeating the purpose of the weapon. It would still be fucking cool to see though.

Calculate KE, then convert to tons of TNT.

>telephone-sized rod

>orbital velocity is 3.7km/s
try 7.8km/s for LEO

Earth orbit isn't high enough. You want to fire from the asteroid belt.

>not using jovian gravity assist for maximum hammer of god effect

And they wouldn't fuck you over for putting a tungsten rod in space? Oh surely they won't realize it's a weapon just launching a massive rod into orbit for fun.

Don't worry, its just an inert test payload for my new rocket.

>spending materials and money on bringing tons of materials into orbit
No bro, we need to send space drones to asteroids, hatch onto a rock, shape it like a giant bullet or missile and then use the drone's engines to fly it back to earth as a weapon.

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That gif is the best thing ever

>you will never do your duty by populating humanities intergalactic lebensraum

>you will never love under the light of an alien star

how to spot a brainlet that has no fucking clue about anything

they talk about "rods from god"

UPDATE
WHEN

higher orbit is slower retard
thats one of the basic things about orbits

3.5km/s is likely the reentry speed of suborbital ICBM's

I worked out that a 17 tonne rod of tungsten moving at 3500m/s has the energy of roughly 25500 tonnes of tnt. Stronger than the fat man nuke that blew up nagasaki

>higher orbit = slower and that's all there is to it top lel
Those are the underage retards posting on Veeky Forums.

>higher orbit is slower retard
just because you're not making laps around the earth faster than a low orbit doesn't mean its slower.

Never, since he finished the book.

Distance from Impact: 1km
Projectile diameter: 2.55 meters
Projectile Density: 19300 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 3.50 km per second
Impact Angle: 90 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock

Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 1.03 x 1012 Joules = 0.25 x 10-3 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 1.3 years

Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the tilt of Earth's axis (< 5 hundreths of a degree).
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.

Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile lands intact, with a velocity 2.74 km/s = 1.7 miles/s.
The energy lost in the atmosphere is 3.97 x 1011 Joules = 0.95 x 10-4 MegaTons.

Crater Dimensions:
Transient Crater Diameter: 93.9 meters
Transient Crater Depth: 33.2 meters
Final Crater Diameter: 117 meters
Final Crater Depth: 25 meters
The crater formed is a simple crater
The floor of the crater is underlain by a lens of broken rock debris (breccia) with a maximum thickness of 11.6 meters.
At this impact velocity ( < 12 km/s), little shock melting of the target occurs.

Thermal Radiation:
At this impact velocity ( < 15 km/s), little vaporization occurs; no fireball is created, therefore, there is no thermal radiation damage.

Seismic Effects:
The major seismic shaking will arrive approximately 200 milliseconds after impact.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 2.0
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 1 km:
I. Not felt except by a very few under especially favorable conditions.
II. Felt only by a few persons at rest, especially on upper floors of buildings.

Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive approximately 3.03 seconds after impact.
Peak Overpressure: 3660 Pa
Max wind velocity: 8.49 m/s
Sound Intensity: 71 dB (Loud as heavy traffic)
Damage Description: Glass windows may shatter.

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mate, maybe you should go back to highschool. There are more errors in your text, than I am willing to point out here...

>send kill vehicle
>the rod is now 1000 tiny rods going at the same speed but impacting a larger area still obliterating whatever it was going towards effortlessly

YES PERFECT

>putting words into my ass

it is slower
literally
in mph
slower