Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

Imagine the power to drop a crowbar from space on to anywhere on the planet. Wreck a tank or obliterate an enemy commander... It is the perfect weapon system, capable of absolutely discriminatory payload delivery with no risk to material and no effective defense short of living in a mine shaft. You just need someone responsible and sane to control this system.

I nominate me.

No. Bad. Fail. It would burn up in the atmosphere, just like anything smaller than a large meteorite.

Not if you engineer for ablation. Basically, make it about 50-75% larger than you want, knowing that about half the mass is going to vaporize off; and make it aerodynamic so that it doesn't generate as much friction. Meteorites, asteroids, space junk all tend to burn up because they're big, unwieldy items that heat up like a mofo. ICBMs don't because they're thin and designed for better airflow. There's a RAND Corporation study that looked into the engineering side of a weapon like PTTG is talking about, and the consensus was basically that it wouldn't be easy, but it could be done. With effects that scaled up. IIRC, a 1m tungsten core dropped from LEO would generate the equivalent blast damage of 424 tons of TNT, partly from kinetic impact and partly from hypervelocity shock effects. Also had a penetrating capability of about 1.5m of steel. And it scales in a geometric function--bigger projectiles have way better blast damage and armor penetration. But yeah, you could have a feasible weapon with a 1m, 92kg tungsten "rod" shaped roughly like the nosecone of an ICBM. Initial velocity when leaving the weapon platform would only need to be a few hundred m/s.
 

[DJ]

One good thing about space arms race is that we'd finally start making some technological progress towards becoming a truly space-faring race. There haven't been any major achievements on that front for decades.

[Osmosis Jones]

Mutually Assured Destruction.
Keeping the peace since since 1945.

Relevant

[Aqizzar]

Also relevant.  Be sure to watch the movie.  tl;dr, it's a dual IRBM launcher that looks exactly like a IS standard shipping container, so it can be carried and plunked anywhere like the other billion shipping containers on Earth without a second glance.  Made and sold by a private Russian company.  Thanks guys.

[RedKing]

Cute video. "Look at peaceful Red country, helpless before imperialist, US-armed Blue country! But Red country is smart, they buy Club-K!"

But most major powers already have some SRBM/MRBM launch system that's wheeled, or rail-capable or sea-launched. And most minor powers/terrorist groups aren't going to have a good capacity to feed accurate nav data to the missile. Might be good for striking stationary targets, very difficult to hit carrier groups without good electronic recon data and a way to feed that data real-time to the missile.

Definitely makes them easier to smuggle though. Most likely market is going to be nations under some kind of weapons sanction buying through an intermediate country.

It's an item of concern, but I agree with the article you linked that it's perhaps being overblown by some Western media outlets.

[MrWiggles]

One good thing about space arms race is that we'd finally start making some technological progress towards becoming a truly space-faring race. There haven't been any major achievements on that front for decades.

No it wouldn't. Political fevers don't generate long term interest. It promotes fanatical short term gain though. NASA is what it is today because of political fever. Once the need to get there was accomplished so did all the steam pushing for its progression.

[Ampersand]

Yeah, MAD is keeping the peace alright. Except in Israel, Iraq, Vietnam, Iraq again, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Grenada, Africa... All Mutually Assured Destruction has really done is ensure war is conducted by other means.