Rods From God

NY Times ^ | 12/10/2010 | Johnathan Shainin

[fso301]

Bump for future reference

[Former Proud Canadian]

Good post.

I love people on FR who think that anybody who signed up after the millenium is a newbie. Only on FR.

[M Kehoe]

8^)

5.56mm

[ConservativeMind]

This article is from 2006, not 2010 as you posted. FYI.

[darth]

The best way to provide extra mass for this weapon is to only send up the shells (reentry vehicles) with the guidance systems attached. Then use asteroid soil/rock to fill them. The mass we need is already in orbit. This is one of the first high-value uses for asteroid mined soil.

Or we could just use large asteroid boulders by attaching guidance systems.

BTW, the best way to orbit them is in a high elliptical orbit. Very little energy is needed at the apogee (top of of the orbital path) to change the impact point when the weapon is de-orbited.

[Svartalfiar]

Yep. Several scifi novels mention stuff like this as well. I think the Red Alert series might have had a game or two with this as one of the superweapons

[usconservative]

And that M Kehoe? What a newb....

Listen up noob, no one cares what you think.

USC
(Member since 6/28/98)

[usconservative]

I love people on FR who think that anybody who signed up after the millenium is a newbie.

Wrong, anyone who signed up after the March for Justice is a noob .... (which incidentally makes you a noob.)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks sonofstrangelove. Ed Teller also suggested the use of tungsten rods (spaced uniformly using kevlar or something) in motion to break up threatening asteroids.

More properly known as hypervelocity rod bundles, these weapons would simply be slender solid tungsten cylinders, 20 or 30 feet long and one or two feet in diameter. The rods would be sent into space and fired from satellites at bunkers on the ground, which they would hit at speeds of more than 10,000 feet per second, penetrating deep into the earth without any explosives. The idea is far from new. Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction writer and space-weapons expert, conceived it while working for Boeing in the late 1950s; he called the weapon Thor, and as he explained in an interview, "People periodically rediscover it."

[neverdem]

December 10, 2006 is the date of the story.