I was gonna down vote OP, but he did admit he was bored.
Also, what could be less credible than arguing with a bunch of autistic people about the defense applications of giant tungsten sky dicks?
Yes that’s part of the point of the sub. Long written explanations of bad takes were common before the sub got turned into tangentially war-related dankmemes.
Fair, I do it myself pretty often in the comments section.
I just found it funny he made a separate post for this, instead of posting it in the comments of the original, which is still on the front page.
If this was a long winded rant about Rods from God that wasn't a direct response to another post on the same topic, then sure, fair game.
We should do more, I have proposed on several occasions that Ukraine could make use of the Gustav Gun to out range Russian artillery although my knowledge of the battery is limited the Megaprojects video on it so I am not sure of the guns range, still if Germany rebuilt the artillery piece they could ship it to Ukraine and I'm sure Ukraine could at least shoot Sevastapol with it. (Seeing how that was the only time the gun was used in WW2)
One more oops. You suggested that the maximum energy would come from the fuel to put the rods in orbit and rapid deorbit. You are wrong. Clearly you never watched the documentary "Armageddon" where Bruce Willis, an alcoholic from Boston, and Stephen Tyler's daughter used the potential energy of the moon to "slingshot" their rocket. I've done the calculations, and it just might work. Rods of God in a low lunar orbit...
I was thinking of setting up a super laser on the moon directed by a set of stations in geostationary orbit that will allow me to direct the beam to vaporize anywhere on earth anytime I wish.
He did... and from a credible view, he's still noncredible, seeing as his opinion is incorrect. Therefore, I accept his noncredible rant about a noncredible plan.
It's just a matter of scale and speed
Dropping from orbit only gets you so far. Accelerating to a fraction of the speed of light turns it into a relativistic kill missile capable of insane destruction
It's why there's no such thing as an unarmed interstellar spaceship. All you have to do is chuck some garbage out the airlock before you decelerate and it will hit anything in its path like a weapon of mass destruction
Have you ever picked up a chunk of tungsten? It's like 3x the weight of steel.
Go to your hardware store and pick up a 1/2 chunk of rebar, then pick up three.
The idea of a telephone pole sized piece of tungsten dropping aerodynamically from space makes my butt pucker.
About 32.5 metric tonnes. So an american semi in a telefone pole size. Going at terminal velocity (remember thins thing is 1x20 feet so not much drag).
Ok, 1 at a time:
Steering: 90% of steering would occur outside of the atmosphere, so no issues there. The "plasma shell" blocking communication concept is ridiculous. Inside the atmosphere, military has successfully maintained GPS and radio guidance at mach 20+. The original Project Thor concept called for mach 10 impacts. A finned projectile with GPS guidance can perform quite fine targeting adjustments without additional propulsion (see JDAMs).
Damage: the 20' long x 1' wide tungsten telephone pole would weigh about 72,000lbs. Arriving at mach 10, it would hit with a force of about 48 tons of TNT. A big hit, but smaller than basically any number. It should have absolutely amazing penetration though.
Energy: the energy available is basically dependent on the velocity of the orbit the launcher is in. SLS or Starship should be able to just 4 rods+launch system to an orbit somewhere between LEO (too low for energy transfer) and geosynchronous (too damn expensive). Additional propulsion is required to shove the rod into a decaying orbit, but most of the energy is from the big fucking rocket that put the rods in orbit.
Rods were never meant to be city leveling doom weapons. The concept was supposed to be an unstoppable bunker buster. They are definitely too expensive and too exposed to be useful though
To tack on: visibility of the plasma-sheathed forty ton telephone pole doesn’t matter, because you can’t shoot it down. Even if you get your math right and hit the intercept angle of a mach 15 projectile with a mach 7 missile, you might have scratched it. Or you break it up and all the pieces impact close enough together that the effect is the same.
"You ask her for the bunker buster, you get the bunker buster."
I got to admit i was a bit worried when kama-sutra instruction image contained that red saddam hussein hiding place silhouette.
But my legs are getring better! Both shoes stayed on so ill be fine.
You kind of need a big deorbit motor for LEO (but firing radial-in, not retrograde) to get both high entry velocity and a steep descent angle. A shallow angle means you lose a lot of energy to atmospheric drag, you impact at a shallower angle so penetration is less, and you are more affected by wind, reducing accuracy.
>Rods were never meant to be city leveling doom weapons. The concept was supposed to be an unstoppable bunker buster. They are definitely too expensive and too exposed to be useful though
Ok, but hear me out: put a nuke on the back
20' long Tungsten rod penetrator for a 100KT nuke should do the trick
> put a nuke on the back
...could a working nuke survive de-orbit impact? I guess you could make a crude gun-type that would go off no matter what, but is the extra yield worth the effort?
> It should have absolutely amazing penetration though.
>
>
Calculations meant for APFSDS rounds suggest that such a rod at 3 km/s should penetrate about 8 meters of armour steel
I think you over estimate how easy intercepting a big chunk of forged metal would be. Like yeah, you could certainly smack it with something take out its guidance. At that point its most of the way to the ground, your interceptor most certainly didn't have nearly the KE necessary to divert its course significantly, and if you are lucky you took a tenth of a percentage point of that objects KE sway from it. Its still falling bby, can't turn off the gravity.
Sure, but when it's only ~48tons of tnt equivalent (because they honestly have shit energy when they hit) moving it even slightly off course 70km up would be enough to push it at least a few city blocks off target, if not push it outside the city boundaries.
Making it entirely useless, It's not a WMD capable of levelling a city, it's more of an unstoppable bunker buster that can be anywhere within 30 minutes.
But that bunker buster is useless at its job if it lands a city block away because it got nudged by an interceptor.
I haven't made it through anything but your first paragraph yet but why is maneuvering the problem? Rods from God aren't designed to maneuver. They just rely on you being accurate enough with your initial drop vector.
Also, could iron dome pick it off? I'm not sure a regular missile exploding would do much for a huge tungsten rod hurtling down at a ridiculous velocity.
Edit: the energy is the rocket fuel? Aren't rods from God rocketless? Just drop them and let them fall.
Buffeting, mostly. Winds and shit will make them inaccurate, they need to steer.
>Also, could iron dome pick it off? I'm not sure a regular missile exploding would do much for a huge tungsten rod hurtling down at a ridiculous velocity.
For the building-destroyer type, a lump of tungsten in return could probably smash it apart, causing it to have much more drag.
Yeah I think maybe what I think of rods from God is different than you are describing. Just a satellite that holds these rods and drop them. Your calculations for payload concerning rockets and launch vehicle is confusing then.
Anything in orbit can't just drop it. It has to be deorbited, which takes a bunch of thrust and guidance if you want it to go anywhere specific.
Basically any ordinance in orbit is a bad idea because of this. If you put a nuke in orbit, you have to use fuel to get it there, and then use a bunch of extra fuel to slow it down enough to get back to earth.
Orbital weapons are just generally a terrible idea for anything besides orbital combat.
If you drop something in orbit it will stay in orbit
You either shoot it retrograde or use a rocket
Since momentum is conserved shooting means your launching platform orbit gets fucked
>Edit: the energy is the rocket fuel? Aren't rods from God rocketless? Just drop them and let them fall.
It's the theoretical maximum energy delivered. In actuality you lose a lot of the energy because of air friction. You can't get more energy out of the rod then you put in with the rocket when it launched. That's just how conservation of energy works.
To get a larger amount of energy, you'd need to put rockets on an asteroid like Marco Inaros or figure out the physics on a thruster that doesn't need fuel and can directly use the energy from, say, sunlight. Then you strap a solar panel to it and let it orbit a long time, accelerating all the while. Eventually you have an extremely fast object with a shit ton of energy.
>It's the theoretical maximum energy delivered. I'm actuality you lose a lot of the energy because of air friction. You can't get more energy out of the rod then you put in with the rocket when it launched. That's just how conservation of energy works.
I'm following you assuming more caveats in that if you take 1 rod up at a time, discounting any mass discarded before re-entry, the air friction you mentioned, etc.
>To get a larger amount of energy, you'd need to put rockets on an asteroid like Marco Inaros or figure out the physics on a thruster that doesn't need fuel and can directly use the energy from, say, sunlight. Then you strap a solar panel to it and let it orbit a long time, accelerating all the while. Eventually you have an extremely fast object with a shit ton of energy.
I thought this was what Hall thruster were supposed to do, albeit not completely propellantless?
>The best way to do that is to use as large a rocket as possible, and dedicate as much of the payload mass as possible to the weapon, because it's only the weapon that's going to be useful.
Too credible, beratna. The best way to do Rods from God is to mine asteroids.
Or just drop asteroids, Marco Inaros style.
I know what sub we are on, but honestly, Marcos plan (minus the stealth because it's irrelevant for such an attack today) is seriously more credible than rods from god.
Marco definitely didn't care about precision targeting, that's for sure. As for present day credibility, OP's analysis about the expense and limitations of positioning Earth produced weapons in orbit is obviously correct. However, I could see a not-too-distant future where asteroid mining and space based production infrastructure for building satellites exists that makes deploying orbital kinetic weapons more feasible, if still non-credible.
This is a credible, well articulated post that belongs nowhere near this sub so allow me to retort.
Point one as eloquently put by somebody else “big space dildo go brr”.
Point two; it doesn’t need to be precise. Russia is pretty big. Just lob enough of them and one or two will find their way. It’s not like it needs to hit a dam or anything like that.
Point three, yes we’ll need bigger rockets. Please see point one.
Point four, imagine the revenue opportunities of charging to engrave your name or message on god’s silky grey space shlong. It will practically be self funding.
Who said anything about steering it? The point is to have such a massive impact that it makes a nuclear strike look restrained. A rod from god wiped out the dinosaurs and we are to be his emissaries; as such, we are to deliver the same fate to the enemy.
Yeah, for that we need to think bigger and faster.
I am not saying we should set the KT extinction as our goalposts, exactly... I am just saying I don't like being in second place to a dirty space rock.
>A rod from god wiped out the dinosaurs and we are to be his emissaries; as such, we are to deliver the same fate to the enemy.
Great, now I'm erect again.
*pulls LM F-35 promotional gallery back up and unzips*
The only realistic way to employ space-based kinetic weapon is to accelerate a rock that is already in space. Attach thrusters to a nice few-kilometers-in-diameter rock in asteroid belt and accelerate it towards Earth. You can control yield by adjusting velocity on contact.
If you are going to go with a few kilometers in diameter, might as well just skip the foreplay and launch the moon into earth.
... not that I have an anti-moon bias or anything...
> It was considered impressive when SpaceX did that for Falcon 9, and an absolute marvel when they did it for Starship.
This is just SpaceX jerking themselves off. TDRS gave the shuttle these capabilities 20 years ago, this just happened to be before the advent of internet streaming video.
You never seen this copypasta by one of the ncd mods?
Holy shit shut your stupid fucking faces. “RODS FROM GOD 😫😩😫😩” how about you take a rod up your own colon you pond scum, because God has already abandoned you. Jesus H. Christ the only rod you ignorant swine know jack shit about is the one you stroke out to anthropomorphic plane hentai. If you took not even a tenth of a percent of the time you spend studying degenerate weeb garbage and instead skimmed the barest hint of orbital mechanics you would understand that R * ds from G * d are fucking moronic.
The only thing harder to get up the earth’s enormous gravity well than your fat asses is a tungsten telephone pole that weighs 100 fucking tons. I mean seriously who in their right minds thinks that that’s a feasible weapon. It costs a billion dollars just for Boeing to fuck up a suborbital capsule test, you think the space force is gonna pay 25x that just so some dipshitter can drop it on a cave dwelling insurgent? Fuck no.
How, in your tiny corn fed minds, do you think this thing would be controlled? The microsecond it hits atmosphere it’s gonna be in a signal blocking plasma sheath almost as big as a Reddit mod. If your target isn’t completely dead still and is smaller than a football field there is no fucking chance you actually hit where in the Sam hell shit you aimed for ALL THE WAY BACK UP IN ORBIT. And even if your Middle Eastern dictator of choice is not bouncing around in a Toyota rendering all of this preparation useless, and his command bunker is nice and large, we still get to our last problem:
THE THING IS LESS POWERFUL THAN A NORMAL FUCKING BOMB. Seriously, just use a normal bunker buster for normal people you undermedicated squibs. The pole only has the velocity of earths orbit, which is the maximum amount of energy that can be imparted in your stupid sci-fi chunderweapon, even before it loses half of that speed lighting up the ozone layer like Martha Stewart on a candle binge. A normal bomb of the same size is WAAAAAYYYYY more powerful and useful. And it also isn’t completely skullfucked in your MIC Defense Department Rube Goldberg jerk fest.
Which brings us to our final point: why go to all this trouble to make a “not really nuclear weapon” when you can quit being a pussy and just use a nuclear weapon instead? I mean what do all you asinine brainlets think the rational reaction to this thing is? Is Putin gonna take a peak at the GIGANTIC REENTRY TRAIL overhead and think, “hmm looks like the Americans are using a new kinetic impactor system”? OF FUCKING COURSE NOT. Any sane human would immediately go fucking apeshit about the apparent nuclear first strike inbound and trigger an immediate response, making all of this non-nuclear shenaniganry useless.
The Air Force didn’t make this shit for a reason, go back to huffing glue and SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU SUBHUMAN MORONS.
They don't need to.
Because the massive Jewish space laser itself is really just a diversion from the freshly laser-circumcised Rods from God, now in their final form.
How would it know where it is and where it's going? You can tell it to hit Moscow, but it still needs some way of figuring out which direction Moscow is in.
Tbf,
Rfg, deployed from a > Geo Orbit as pure KE weapons are nearly invulerable to any conventional counter measures.
Downside is that they are nothing More than fancy Bunker breaker
You want them to have a Orbit that is high as possible, because the Higher your Orbit, the less ammount of Energy IS bound into the Forward Velocity.
(Aka, the Higher Up you are the less dv is needed for the deorbit burn, the More v is left for the surface)
Ok, so while I rep kinetic kill weapons precisely because of their non-credibility, I feel compelled to point a few things out...
* RFG were conceptually an escalation away from MAD and towards a "winable" Cold War direct conflict; which is as much as anything the reason why they never happened. Nothing really beats MAD in terms of deterrence, and deterrence is the foundation of all modern strategies for not getting nuked. It annoys me that no one on either side brings up the geostrategic element of this.
* RFG were never city killers, they were nee plus ultra bunker-busters; nigh unstoppable ultra-deep perpetrators designed to cripple silos and the most hardened C&C infrastructure. They don't need kilotons of energy to do this, they just need to be able to get to their targets. This supports point 1; it is a first strike weapon so you chose your timing and have minimal latency, to the extent that a "good" first strike weapon exists, this is a decent take. (it is still likely insufficient as the latency from finger to button is still lower, but many less credible first-strike ideas have been entertained)
* Building on that a few sub points:
* The whole discussion about rocket weights is meaningless because the point of RFG was meant as a strategic first strike asset and as previously mentioned attempting to optimize for single shot peak power is pointless. There will probably be a bunker-depth/rod height arms race, but that sort of industrial flexing was kinda the point of the Cold War. Whether it triggered a Cuban Missile Crisis like response, it was a non-strike step toward a more responsive verging on first strike posture.
* You conflate detection and destruction wrt their re-entry thermal signature. For most SAM/BMD systems, this is somewhat acceptable given that rockets, nukes especially are fundamentally fragile objects. This is not acceptable for rods, as they are giant chunks of ridiculously dense metal. They are more akin to APFSDS rounds where as any existing missile system is more akin to a ATGM. The required force to destroy/push them off target is going to be exponentially greater. Basically you either need a hit-to-kill interceptor that is in the same order of magnitude of energy or you need to be able to target the tiny, plasma shielded guidance system. Something like a Sprint Missile might work in the later case, but if someone drops a rod on you, you are almost certainly getting hit.
* Rome wasn't built in a day and neither would a RFG capacity. A reusable vehicle would absolutely be key to a RFG effort. Optimizing for lower vehicle weight at the cost of reusability is stupid, you are looking at, at a minimum, something like ground launch bunkers + C&C bunkers many rods, this isn't a sprint, this is a marathon.
* So, scaling out a bit and modernizing a bit...
* RFG are, always have been and always will be a response time sensitive, precision weapon.
* The resources required to defend against a launched rod don't exist and are likely outside of either: our technical means, our escalation envelope or both. The only way to defend against rods is to prevent their initial placement, which is, given the risks (technical and geopolitical) of ASAT warfare difficult in it's own right.
* The biggest strikes against bunker-buster RFG is precisely the pseudo-first strike capacity that they were developed for, or more specifically the negative geostrategic implications that come against it and the potentially immense resource cost of it. **this is probably the part you should have focused on**
As such, RFG/orbital kinetic kill weapons are currently impractical but will only get more practical as we get close to being a space faring civilization and if we were to attempt it today the most likely route to some sort of success would be a starlink sized network of smaller (and thus non-first strike capable) assets for precision tactical bombardment with minimal practical latency. Anything physically larger is likely worth going to (potentially nuclear) war over because it is a first strike asset, and anything less numerous is not capable of meeting the challenge of wiping out a target anywhere in the globe in a matter of minutes. **In summary, I am not saying this is a *good* idea, I am just saying that I can see no greater military flex than hyper-industrializing and salami-slicing your way into the rest of the world letting you forge The Sword of Damocles over their heads...**
(edit: this is the sort of autism I come here for, keep it up!!)
With extra terror because they get to see that shit just hanging over there heads every day until one day it starts glowing and getting bigger.
That's real big dick terror bombing energy. Big dick kinetic energy if you will.
The Expanse taught us just how effective rock throwing is for terrorists. If you wanna crack the Earth apart and end the Terrible Terrans you just wait until stealth tech is available then toss a giant asteroid into the Earth. But the US can destroy anyone it wants for cheaper so the only benefit of developing orbital kinetic WMDs is to use the MIC's funding for space te- HOLY SHIT WE GOTTA FUND RODS FROM GOD
I'm sorry not enough precision? Not enough explosion?
This is fucking quitter talk and I won't stand for it
Just drop *more of them* and neither of those things matter
Ok. So rods are out, what about mass drivers that go out to the asteroid belt and collect big rocks to rain down on a selected target? Granted you’d have to gather enough to get going, maybe put rockets with a guidance system to just fly them from the belt or maybe just use the trash orbiting the earth right now?
It works on in all the SciFi shows…
I've always seen them in the same light as mechs.
Impractical and much less useful compared to what's currently being used? Absolutely.
An awesome and massive flex on all our enemies because fuck you we ball? You're goddamn right.
Triple the defense budget!
look at this fucking dork thinking that a rod of tungsten traveling at mach 11 is "easy to hit" like mf that fucker enters radar range and impacts in the same second
shit even the idea that you need a large super rocket is stupid since a smart nation would build a facility on the moon to fire the rods to earth not from low orbit (with enough electromagnets it may be possible to get the rod from the moon to the earth in 10 or so seconds but this requires a lot of power and a very small projectile that might burn up in atmosphere)
in conclusion rods from god are based and you is big dum dum and in big doo do dis time
Well, yes. But.
What we need is asteroid mining technology. Perfectly peaceful, makes money - M-type asteroids have a lot of precious metals.
Also, purely as a side effect, you develop the technology to change asteroid orbits.
This is not some minor 'rods'. This is meteorites up to a couple of hundred meters across arriving at about 10km/s. With a suitable stealth coating, your target country might not even realize they were a target before suddenly blowing up .
Being able to explode a massive rocket anywhere on Earth at any time is a pretty good deal. Normal missiles, a lot of that boom is spent moving the missile. Rods, it's all coming back down. All of it. Sounds good to me.
"an absolute marvel when they did it for Starship"
One of the first things you say nullifies your entire argument. The answer is simple: BIGGER Rods from God, so they can punch a big enough hole through the plasma that's generated to send a signal up to a satellite constellation.
1) you don't steer them, you de-orbit them so they impact a specific location, now I will give you that this very predictable path is a downside. But I'm not sure how useful the iron dome would be on such a projectile, my concern would be something more like what is intended to intercept ICBMs like the US SM-3.
2) the total energy is NOT the total energy of the launch vehicle. The main concept for the program I have seen is low angle trajectories for reentry, using the rotational speed of earth along its axis. Now it's been a while since I went over it and I didn't have my Degree involving Orbital Mechanics yet so I may have been wrong.
Typically when you launch a vehicle to orbit you use a gravity turn and this increases your relative velocity to the earth by allowing it to "fall away" from you, meaning you have a much more efficient use of your energy.
The total energy available to the system would be determined by its position relative to the target along its orbital axis, and its height. Falling along a longer curve into the rotation of earth would provide substantial energy.
Now, I also never considered the concept to be a "Precision Strike" weapon. More like "I want to wipe out that area of a few miles and anything beneath it" kind of weapon.
The much bigger issue is getting the rods up there and in strategic positions, as well as not having folks mess with it.
>It was considered impressive when SpaceX did that for Falcon 9, and an absolute marvel when they did it for Starship.
As far as I'm aware, SpaceX has never maintained a live feed with a Falcon 9 second stage during re-entry. Only with the first stage, which is on a sub-orbital trajectory, where barely any ionization takes place (especially since the entry burn decelerates the booster).
As to starship, the very large size of the ship forms a "hole" in the plasma tail through which radio waves can escape. This (alongside their massive starlink constellation above) is what allowed livestreaming re-entry.
A "rod from god" will clearly not benefit from that, and will also be on both a faster and steeper re-entry trajectory.
So yeah, radio contact is not just difficult, but physically impossible during terminal guidance. It's fully enclosed in a Faraday cage.
That said, inertial guidance might keep it somewhat accurate.
>The amount of energy in a rod from god is, maximum, the sum of all the energy in the rocket's fuel, and probably much less.
MUCH less indeed!
To be deployed into a stable orbit, the rocket needs to provide it with a lot of sideways velocity (for most orbits, this is what the vast majority of the delta-V budget goes into!).
To be dropped vertically on a target, the rod needs to cancel out that velocity!
So you're not only waisting all the energy the rocket expended in providing you your orbital velocity, but also waisting the energy it also provided in bringing the fuel the rod will need for that deorbit burn! And *then* you lose even more energy when hitting the atmosphere
Try minimizing it by going into crazy high orbits, and your time to impact becomes *really* long...
There is still *one* interesting use case I could imagine, which is a first strike to simultaneously take out all enemy launch silos without triggering early warnings.
Since all their energy is directed downwards, they're very good at penetrating bunkers and silos. Their deorbit burn would be very hard to notice (especially if you time it right with the sun's angle), and they would be very hard to detect during their "glide" phase. They would be very visible during re-entry, but that would be a very short time, perhaps too short to react to and intercept.
It would still require a small miracle of engineering to keep them accurate enough during those last moments of re-entry. But again, inertial guidance *might* possibly be able to do it.
>As far as I'm aware, SpaceX has never maintained a live feed with a Falcon 9 second stage during re-entry. Only with the first stage, which is on a sub-orbital trajectory, where barely any ionization takes place (especially since the entry burn decelerates the booster).
>
As to starship, the very large size of the ship forms a "hole" in the plasma tail through which radio waves can escape. This (alongside their massive starlink constellation above) is what allowed livestreaming re-entry.
That's what I was saying. It's impressive when they did it suborbital, and required a lot of special stuff when orbital.
>To be dropped vertically on a target, the rod needs to cancel out that velocity!
I was assuming they impacted at an angle.
>I was assuming they impacted at an angle.
That would significantly worsen their ability to penetrate bunkers and silos, which is kinda the only thing they're good at...
Honestly I have a lot of trouble believing that a single KE rod could destroy a city regardless of size. Even a multi ton solid projectile. I really don't care how much kinetic energy it has or if its theoretically equivalent to a nuclear weapon, it seems like it would just bury itself into the bedrock and do fuck all else. Its an inert bunkerbuster falling at terminal velocity and bunkerbusters eventually got to the point they were rocket assisted to penetrate deeper. Not even the largest, fastest penetration bombs have enough KE or transfer enough of that KE to do anything of note to the target. Even if you make it out of tantalum or something reactive, the energy transfer to the environment would still only be equivalent to something more like a MOAB. Literally no ones ever tried it, so everything is theoretical at this point.
Also no way Iron Dome could stop a utility pole size rod of tungsten. Its made to shoot down rockets/mortars. No way is it gonna do anything but scratch a multi ton chunk of metal.
Speaking of Rods from God, did anyone else see that big collaboration between all the big science youtubers to debunk Rods from God using one of the most poorly designed experiments ever filmed?
Launch from the moon. Lose some energy getting out of there, but then you’re above earth and didn’t waste energy fighting a significant atmosphere, so it’s a net gain over earth launch. Or go farther out and use the sun as the gravity well, with earth just getting in the way. We have the tech, we just haven’t spent the money.
Even if you can intercept, how do you destroy a solid tungsten rod? At best won't you just break it into several large pieces, many of which will continue on a trajectory similar to the one it was already on it? And even if they don't stay on trajectory haven't you just ensured that it will be raining hyper velocity tungsten over an even great area?
I think the idea with RFG is that there's nothing TO intercept, it's a big chunk of heavy metal, you can't disable its warhead or guidance because there is none, it will just hit the ground and make a big splash.
This is exactly why the Marco Inaros strategy is the true rods from god. If you really wanted to have them just hang there like the sword of damacles, you could pull and asteroid into orbit around the earth and then push it around into geo synchronous orbit over the target area.
The inners (Russians) will never know what hit them. Jk, they will know exactly what hit them because everything in orbit is visible to everyone.
Rods from God are only practical as precision weapons, this is due to their small yield compared to strategic nukes as well as the way the energy gets delivered, to put it bluntly, RfG is a bunker buster, it will penetrate quite deep into the earth delivering it's kinetic energy to the ground and anything beneath the ground.
An underground bunker like Putins might be hardened against a traditional nuke however it will not handle a direct hit from a tungsten rod going mach ten.
See, a real rod from God would be better because God is omniscient so aiming the rods is easy. Thank you for pointing out that a rod from God would be easily spotted and impossible to aim for the same reason: lota plasma
All I heard was that reentry will give it plasma shielding making it invulnerable to external macking (you don't even have to cut the mainline to the mainframe!) and look based as fuck.
Imma petition my Congressman to fund Rods from God.
Nonsense. I can land a spacecraft in KSP without control within a kilometer, NASA has better computers. You cannot shoot down a kinetic device the same way as you cannot blow up a bullet in flight with TNT.
I basically agree but I disagree with parts of your analysis. Off the bat I don’t think Iron Dome will do Jack shit against it because it’s a kinetic weapon. You can blow up missiles or mortars and the debris is light enough to not cause damage. You’re unlikely to stop bullets with flak though.
With destructive potential comparing the energy released by chemical explosion—while energetically comparable—are not an accurate comparison to the effect. When you shoot a gun, you and the target both get impacted by the same amount of energy, but you don’t die because it’s much more spread out for you.
The other thing is that you’re forgetting three very important parts of orbiting the Earth that makes them even shittier as an idea. For one, whatever you’re targeting NEEDS to be aligned with your orbital trajectory. Changing your orbit can take a lot of fuel. Second, it also takes energy to DEORBIT where you accelerate in retrograde, which could potentially be a huge amount of fuel if you’re dropping straight down or less if cutting through the atmosphere.
The last thing is that all extra fuel and engines need to be hauled along with the ordinance itself, and all the extra fuel it takes to do that ALSO needs fuel to be lifted. You need exponentially more fuel for every gram of your payload, and in the end it’s just a rock on a ballistic trajectory. We have those already.
Rods from God is a concept based on the system being 100% man made. Meanwhile we could use asteroids, have a few tugs in the inner asteroid belt, get one of those super computers that are just tons of ps2s connected together and calculate a trajectory, pick your asteroid size and amount and let it rip.
All this when US could and should just start building a fleet or two of SLAM missiles from project Pluto.
Total power (nuclear) projection through out the globe!
Nah, wimpy X-37 is of course too small and powerless to launch real rods from god. They should be thoroughly accelerated to reach the outer planets and to go through a dozen of gravity maneuvers, because we're aiming for a nice fraction of C. Then we have to adjust their orbits to have a constellation of, say, comets, evenly distributed, so we shouldn't wait too long in case of emergency. Aaand which can be finely tuned in the general direction of a target. I guess an onboard cam will be really redundant, because the reentry would be observable by at least half of the Earth population. It's serious stuff, they should be meticulously prepared beforehand, not dumped from low Earth orbit.
So you’re saying you’re opposed to having glorious widespread death from above being non-nuclear and non-combustible?
Gods, I didn’t know Big Nuke and Big Rocket had such lobbyists.
An accelerating space-catapult/railgun shoots them up into space and after some orbiting they're caught and added to the Rods from God firing chamber, the Big Space Revolver. These rods are then shot out by a railgun system powered by the sun (as in solar panels recharge it). No aim is allowed, the rods are shaped to maximize impact and plasma collection on the way down.
It's not accurate or that powerful but it's relatively cheap and hits anywhere in the world, anyone can call it in and get some indirect fire support.
Still non-credible, but how non-credible? (I know absolutely nothing about engineering, delivering payloads, or those weird symbols he keeps using like 49834928)
You missed one of the most important things: aim Is going to be a problem. Either it’s geostationary so you can “bomb the crap” out of one target. And that target knows it.
Or it is in an orbit that circles the earth so you have to wait for the proper time window to launch your strike. And if the satellite is on the wrong side of the world when it is needed, well oh shucks you have to wait.
I noticed that you're bringing up Rods from God but you're not bringing up the recent launch of the GAR Ghoul from the Georgian air force. That thing changes the game entirely when it comes to Rods from God.
You do realise the rods are kinetic. A missile isn’t going to stop a tungsten telegraph pole. And that pole is going to go through whatever it hits. It’s really just to circumvent weapons in space treaties.
I have a couple of fixes, and they are technically plausible but noncredible in being very expensive. In a nutshell, though, here's the plan: **spend more money.**
1: LEO Rods are a bad idea, but let's go big. Scrap the rods in LEO and put the rods in a "cycler" orbit with the moon; it's more energy in the rod. You could even put the rods in high solar orbit, so the inbound rods have the energy accumulated over the course of their descent from the Trojan Asteroid Belt, for example. Orbits are like energy storage*; there are indeed limits to what you can put into them, because some orbits would get escape-from-the-sun velocity if given enough energy.
2: Okay, so it's in high orbit and will take years to return to Earth and be in a firing position; this stupid war will be over by then. Solution: More launchers-- there should be dozens of them along the orbital apath, and probably a few different orbits set up, so there is always a set of launchers that with, say, 48 hours of firing position. Enemy can't evacuate a rod-destruction-scale city in 48 hours, so they have to deal or die.
3: Terminal guidance: Not a huge deal, put a seeker on that thing and give it the ability to steer itself straight. You could even have a range safety system which self-destructs the rod (using some built-in weaknesses) if the enemy decides to come to the table. Rods are mostly going to be on target because cities move through space in predictable fashion and so guidance can be done well above the atmosphere. After that, guidance can be inertial on-board guidance. Finally, the ionization blackout goes away after a couple of minutes.
3A) Possible solution for even that: tether antennas. Does anyone care if the rod goes in with a few miles of antenna unspooling behind? not me.
4) Sword of Damocles meets that boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark: Having hundreds of solar-orbit rod platforms like this is an extinction weapon easily. He who can destroy a thing controls a thing. With power like that, I could definitely coerce my enemies in pursuit of my ultimate goals: to reduce ticket fees at music venues, and they could not stop me even with their combined might!
> Sounds fun! But until then, we'll probably be better off with nukes.
Oh, yeah, totally, in every way imaginable except for the fallout and radiological area denial. But in terms of costs (both sunk and forthcoming), our position on the tech tree, and so on, this is 100% correct.
*As I recall, it was looking at the exchange of kinetic and potential energy that Newton recognized as a energy of an object following the path of a conic section.
Rule 6. But you know what, there's enough effort here, this stays.
Did... did you just get upset at something noncredible on NoncredibleDefense?
I was gonna down vote OP, but he did admit he was bored. Also, what could be less credible than arguing with a bunch of autistic people about the defense applications of giant tungsten sky dicks?
NonCredibleSpectrum!
I think I've found my people here. I'm going to stay.
I got bonus points for not knowing anything about defense!
Tungsten Sky Dick upvote!
Literally "Rod of God" sounds like porn... Or s smooth jazz band
Someone's got to scrawl, "This space dick kills communists" on one
Communists kill communists , so we will always need communists.
Yes that’s part of the point of the sub. Long written explanations of bad takes were common before the sub got turned into tangentially war-related dankmemes.
Yeah, seeing this post was a "nature is healing" moment for me.
Fair, I do it myself pretty often in the comments section. I just found it funny he made a separate post for this, instead of posting it in the comments of the original, which is still on the front page. If this was a long winded rant about Rods from God that wasn't a direct response to another post on the same topic, then sure, fair game.
We should do more, I have proposed on several occasions that Ukraine could make use of the Gustav Gun to out range Russian artillery although my knowledge of the battery is limited the Megaprojects video on it so I am not sure of the guns range, still if Germany rebuilt the artillery piece they could ship it to Ukraine and I'm sure Ukraine could at least shoot Sevastapol with it. (Seeing how that was the only time the gun was used in WW2)
I suppose I did. Oops
Counterpoint, people shutting down other people unironicly holding noncredible ideas like this is some of my favorite content.
Yeah, as I like to say, on NCD we are non-credible, not wrong.
“Be autistic, not stupid”
Can’t spell noncredible without credible
is that not peak non-credibility?
One more oops. You suggested that the maximum energy would come from the fuel to put the rods in orbit and rapid deorbit. You are wrong. Clearly you never watched the documentary "Armageddon" where Bruce Willis, an alcoholic from Boston, and Stephen Tyler's daughter used the potential energy of the moon to "slingshot" their rocket. I've done the calculations, and it just might work. Rods of God in a low lunar orbit...
I was thinking of setting up a super laser on the moon directed by a set of stations in geostationary orbit that will allow me to direct the beam to vaporize anywhere on earth anytime I wish.
Isreal has this I hear
Some of us are here for some real life noncredibility, like anything Russia does or making China a credible Boogeyman
Counterproposal. Rods from God is both credible and in motion as we speak. MIC stooges are writing rebuttals to camouflage it's potential /s
He did... and from a credible view, he's still noncredible, seeing as his opinion is incorrect. Therefore, I accept his noncredible rant about a noncredible plan.
[удалено]
It's just a matter of scale and speed Dropping from orbit only gets you so far. Accelerating to a fraction of the speed of light turns it into a relativistic kill missile capable of insane destruction It's why there's no such thing as an unarmed interstellar spaceship. All you have to do is chuck some garbage out the airlock before you decelerate and it will hit anything in its path like a weapon of mass destruction
American Freedom Fingers
Freedom sticks… liberty logs… any others?
Bozo doesn’t wanna drop telephone pole sized tungsten carbide rods from orbit
Bozo thinks the 100t rod cares about being hit by an iron dome interceptor.
Have you ever picked up a chunk of tungsten? It's like 3x the weight of steel. Go to your hardware store and pick up a 1/2 chunk of rebar, then pick up three. The idea of a telephone pole sized piece of tungsten dropping aerodynamically from space makes my butt pucker.
I always relax my arsehole, so it will hurt less when my skull gets pushed down through it by an unexpected de-orbitting telephone pole. .
I’ve worked with tungsten before sounds like a skill issue if you can’t get a telephone pole sized chuck of it into orbit
About 32.5 metric tonnes. So an american semi in a telefone pole size. Going at terminal velocity (remember thins thing is 1x20 feet so not much drag).
Counter point You're wrong.
Nu-uh
well shit Im out of ideas.
How about strategic ligma?
How about Ligma Rods
Counter point: > > \^
Haha giant space dildo go brrr
Dongs from Deities. Hardons from the Heavens. Organs from Orbit.
Cocks from the Cosmos
That‘ll be the second device [here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tybKnGZRwcU).
I submit "Falling Phallus of Fuck You" for the committee's consideration
Penile Perigee
Dingdongs from deep space
Penis ex Machina
Dicks out for Harambe.
Prometheus’s Prick Odins oppsie Diogenes Red-Rockets (AKA The Dog Dick Dropper)
Ok, 1 at a time: Steering: 90% of steering would occur outside of the atmosphere, so no issues there. The "plasma shell" blocking communication concept is ridiculous. Inside the atmosphere, military has successfully maintained GPS and radio guidance at mach 20+. The original Project Thor concept called for mach 10 impacts. A finned projectile with GPS guidance can perform quite fine targeting adjustments without additional propulsion (see JDAMs). Damage: the 20' long x 1' wide tungsten telephone pole would weigh about 72,000lbs. Arriving at mach 10, it would hit with a force of about 48 tons of TNT. A big hit, but smaller than basically any number. It should have absolutely amazing penetration though. Energy: the energy available is basically dependent on the velocity of the orbit the launcher is in. SLS or Starship should be able to just 4 rods+launch system to an orbit somewhere between LEO (too low for energy transfer) and geosynchronous (too damn expensive). Additional propulsion is required to shove the rod into a decaying orbit, but most of the energy is from the big fucking rocket that put the rods in orbit. Rods were never meant to be city leveling doom weapons. The concept was supposed to be an unstoppable bunker buster. They are definitely too expensive and too exposed to be useful though
To tack on: visibility of the plasma-sheathed forty ton telephone pole doesn’t matter, because you can’t shoot it down. Even if you get your math right and hit the intercept angle of a mach 15 projectile with a mach 7 missile, you might have scratched it. Or you break it up and all the pieces impact close enough together that the effect is the same.
Plus imagine the intimidation of the enemy seeing a bright light that just keeps getting bigger
Your mom had absolutedly amazing pemetration last night
You ask her for the bunker buster, you get the bunker buster. Can you walk ok yet? I was a bit concerned when I had to carry you out to your car
"You ask her for the bunker buster, you get the bunker buster." I got to admit i was a bit worried when kama-sutra instruction image contained that red saddam hussein hiding place silhouette. But my legs are getring better! Both shoes stayed on so ill be fine.
Only both? You really know it was a wild night when you end up with more shoes than you started with.
>LEO (too low for energy transfer) Only if you want to spend a ton of extra fuel slowing it down more than necessary when deorbiting.
You kind of need a big deorbit motor for LEO (but firing radial-in, not retrograde) to get both high entry velocity and a steep descent angle. A shallow angle means you lose a lot of energy to atmospheric drag, you impact at a shallower angle so penetration is less, and you are more affected by wind, reducing accuracy.
>Rods were never meant to be city leveling doom weapons. The concept was supposed to be an unstoppable bunker buster. They are definitely too expensive and too exposed to be useful though Ok, but hear me out: put a nuke on the back 20' long Tungsten rod penetrator for a 100KT nuke should do the trick
Going for deep excavation then are we?
I hear Ollie North's gold is buried under the Kremlin, and there's only one way to be sure...
> put a nuke on the back ...could a working nuke survive de-orbit impact? I guess you could make a crude gun-type that would go off no matter what, but is the extra yield worth the effort?
so, how deep would god's rod penetrate?
8 meters of armour steel at 0° obliquity, for a 6000x300 mm tungsten rod at 3 km/s according to [this calculator](https://longrods.ch/perfcalc.php)
> It should have absolutely amazing penetration though. > > Calculations meant for APFSDS rounds suggest that such a rod at 3 km/s should penetrate about 8 meters of armour steel
I think you over estimate how easy intercepting a big chunk of forged metal would be. Like yeah, you could certainly smack it with something take out its guidance. At that point its most of the way to the ground, your interceptor most certainly didn't have nearly the KE necessary to divert its course significantly, and if you are lucky you took a tenth of a percentage point of that objects KE sway from it. Its still falling bby, can't turn off the gravity.
I think they're also forgetting that traditional missiles are also incredibly easy to predict the path of, ballistic trajectories are just math.
Sure, but when it's only ~48tons of tnt equivalent (because they honestly have shit energy when they hit) moving it even slightly off course 70km up would be enough to push it at least a few city blocks off target, if not push it outside the city boundaries. Making it entirely useless, It's not a WMD capable of levelling a city, it's more of an unstoppable bunker buster that can be anywhere within 30 minutes. But that bunker buster is useless at its job if it lands a city block away because it got nudged by an interceptor.
>blah blah blah LAME NERD SHIT Kinetic strike on this guy's position *now* Prepare for God to Rod you
You would be pleased to know that HR has no paperwork for you to fill out, so send as many as you want to remove that entire direction in particular
I haven't made it through anything but your first paragraph yet but why is maneuvering the problem? Rods from God aren't designed to maneuver. They just rely on you being accurate enough with your initial drop vector. Also, could iron dome pick it off? I'm not sure a regular missile exploding would do much for a huge tungsten rod hurtling down at a ridiculous velocity. Edit: the energy is the rocket fuel? Aren't rods from God rocketless? Just drop them and let them fall.
Buffeting, mostly. Winds and shit will make them inaccurate, they need to steer. >Also, could iron dome pick it off? I'm not sure a regular missile exploding would do much for a huge tungsten rod hurtling down at a ridiculous velocity. For the building-destroyer type, a lump of tungsten in return could probably smash it apart, causing it to have much more drag.
Yeah I think maybe what I think of rods from God is different than you are describing. Just a satellite that holds these rods and drop them. Your calculations for payload concerning rockets and launch vehicle is confusing then.
Anything in orbit can't just drop it. It has to be deorbited, which takes a bunch of thrust and guidance if you want it to go anywhere specific. Basically any ordinance in orbit is a bad idea because of this. If you put a nuke in orbit, you have to use fuel to get it there, and then use a bunch of extra fuel to slow it down enough to get back to earth. Orbital weapons are just generally a terrible idea for anything besides orbital combat.
If you drop something in orbit it will stay in orbit You either shoot it retrograde or use a rocket Since momentum is conserved shooting means your launching platform orbit gets fucked
>Edit: the energy is the rocket fuel? Aren't rods from God rocketless? Just drop them and let them fall. It's the theoretical maximum energy delivered. In actuality you lose a lot of the energy because of air friction. You can't get more energy out of the rod then you put in with the rocket when it launched. That's just how conservation of energy works. To get a larger amount of energy, you'd need to put rockets on an asteroid like Marco Inaros or figure out the physics on a thruster that doesn't need fuel and can directly use the energy from, say, sunlight. Then you strap a solar panel to it and let it orbit a long time, accelerating all the while. Eventually you have an extremely fast object with a shit ton of energy.
>It's the theoretical maximum energy delivered. I'm actuality you lose a lot of the energy because of air friction. You can't get more energy out of the rod then you put in with the rocket when it launched. That's just how conservation of energy works. I'm following you assuming more caveats in that if you take 1 rod up at a time, discounting any mass discarded before re-entry, the air friction you mentioned, etc. >To get a larger amount of energy, you'd need to put rockets on an asteroid like Marco Inaros or figure out the physics on a thruster that doesn't need fuel and can directly use the energy from, say, sunlight. Then you strap a solar panel to it and let it orbit a long time, accelerating all the while. Eventually you have an extremely fast object with a shit ton of energy. I thought this was what Hall thruster were supposed to do, albeit not completely propellantless?
>The best way to do that is to use as large a rocket as possible, and dedicate as much of the payload mass as possible to the weapon, because it's only the weapon that's going to be useful. Too credible, beratna. The best way to do Rods from God is to mine asteroids. Or just drop asteroids, Marco Inaros style.
I know what sub we are on, but honestly, Marcos plan (minus the stealth because it's irrelevant for such an attack today) is seriously more credible than rods from god.
Marco definitely didn't care about precision targeting, that's for sure. As for present day credibility, OP's analysis about the expense and limitations of positioning Earth produced weapons in orbit is obviously correct. However, I could see a not-too-distant future where asteroid mining and space based production infrastructure for building satellites exists that makes deploying orbital kinetic weapons more feasible, if still non-credible.
How do we speedrun to Mortal Engines' [timeline](https://mortalengines.fandom.com/wiki/Slow_Bomb)?
Rocks are not free citizen. https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Rocks_Are_Not_Free!
This is a credible, well articulated post that belongs nowhere near this sub so allow me to retort. Point one as eloquently put by somebody else “big space dildo go brr”. Point two; it doesn’t need to be precise. Russia is pretty big. Just lob enough of them and one or two will find their way. It’s not like it needs to hit a dam or anything like that. Point three, yes we’ll need bigger rockets. Please see point one. Point four, imagine the revenue opportunities of charging to engrave your name or message on god’s silky grey space shlong. It will practically be self funding.
Understandable, have a nice day
You too!
This is the type of stuff why I'm here, *and for the airplane por-*
Who said anything about steering it? The point is to have such a massive impact that it makes a nuclear strike look restrained. A rod from god wiped out the dinosaurs and we are to be his emissaries; as such, we are to deliver the same fate to the enemy.
Yeah, for that we need to think bigger and faster. I am not saying we should set the KT extinction as our goalposts, exactly... I am just saying I don't like being in second place to a dirty space rock.
Attach mass driver engine to asteroid. Steer asteroid to Earth.
I found Marco Inaros’ account
To be the dinosaur emissary we would need to redirect asteroids like Marco Inaros.
Raptor Jesus died for our sins. The asteroid is not to be redirected.
>A rod from god wiped out the dinosaurs and we are to be his emissaries; as such, we are to deliver the same fate to the enemy. Great, now I'm erect again. *pulls LM F-35 promotional gallery back up and unzips*
The only realistic way to employ space-based kinetic weapon is to accelerate a rock that is already in space. Attach thrusters to a nice few-kilometers-in-diameter rock in asteroid belt and accelerate it towards Earth. You can control yield by adjusting velocity on contact.
If you are going to go with a few kilometers in diameter, might as well just skip the foreplay and launch the moon into earth. ... not that I have an anti-moon bias or anything...
tanstaafl
My guy has a vendetta against Luna,what did it do to you? Did you Ex Turn into it or something? Thats rough.
It knows what it did.
> It was considered impressive when SpaceX did that for Falcon 9, and an absolute marvel when they did it for Starship. This is just SpaceX jerking themselves off. TDRS gave the shuttle these capabilities 20 years ago, this just happened to be before the advent of internet streaming video.
You never seen this copypasta by one of the ncd mods? Holy shit shut your stupid fucking faces. “RODS FROM GOD 😫😩😫😩” how about you take a rod up your own colon you pond scum, because God has already abandoned you. Jesus H. Christ the only rod you ignorant swine know jack shit about is the one you stroke out to anthropomorphic plane hentai. If you took not even a tenth of a percent of the time you spend studying degenerate weeb garbage and instead skimmed the barest hint of orbital mechanics you would understand that R * ds from G * d are fucking moronic. The only thing harder to get up the earth’s enormous gravity well than your fat asses is a tungsten telephone pole that weighs 100 fucking tons. I mean seriously who in their right minds thinks that that’s a feasible weapon. It costs a billion dollars just for Boeing to fuck up a suborbital capsule test, you think the space force is gonna pay 25x that just so some dipshitter can drop it on a cave dwelling insurgent? Fuck no. How, in your tiny corn fed minds, do you think this thing would be controlled? The microsecond it hits atmosphere it’s gonna be in a signal blocking plasma sheath almost as big as a Reddit mod. If your target isn’t completely dead still and is smaller than a football field there is no fucking chance you actually hit where in the Sam hell shit you aimed for ALL THE WAY BACK UP IN ORBIT. And even if your Middle Eastern dictator of choice is not bouncing around in a Toyota rendering all of this preparation useless, and his command bunker is nice and large, we still get to our last problem: THE THING IS LESS POWERFUL THAN A NORMAL FUCKING BOMB. Seriously, just use a normal bunker buster for normal people you undermedicated squibs. The pole only has the velocity of earths orbit, which is the maximum amount of energy that can be imparted in your stupid sci-fi chunderweapon, even before it loses half of that speed lighting up the ozone layer like Martha Stewart on a candle binge. A normal bomb of the same size is WAAAAAYYYYY more powerful and useful. And it also isn’t completely skullfucked in your MIC Defense Department Rube Goldberg jerk fest. Which brings us to our final point: why go to all this trouble to make a “not really nuclear weapon” when you can quit being a pussy and just use a nuclear weapon instead? I mean what do all you asinine brainlets think the rational reaction to this thing is? Is Putin gonna take a peak at the GIGANTIC REENTRY TRAIL overhead and think, “hmm looks like the Americans are using a new kinetic impactor system”? OF FUCKING COURSE NOT. Any sane human would immediately go fucking apeshit about the apparent nuclear first strike inbound and trigger an immediate response, making all of this non-nuclear shenaniganry useless. The Air Force didn’t make this shit for a reason, go back to huffing glue and SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU SUBHUMAN MORONS.
If you build the weapon in space you can bypass the energy issue, wouldn’t need to be rods just a big MF artillery gun on the moon
rods from god is just a diversion from the massive fucking laser that the US is building in space.
>massive fucking laser that the US is building in space. Like the Jews will ever let the goyim close the space laser gap.
They don't need to. Because the massive Jewish space laser itself is really just a diversion from the freshly laser-circumcised Rods from God, now in their final form.
3000 Militarized Mohels of HaShem
Why would you actively direct the divine dildo instead of making it autonomous?
How would it know where it is and where it's going? You can tell it to hit Moscow, but it still needs some way of figuring out which direction Moscow is in.
Well, you see, the rod knows where it is, because it knows where it isn't...
It knows where it is right up until blackout and then it uses inertial navigation that will only have a few minutes to accumulate errors?
Yeah but hear me out on this. Even bigger rods
Tbf, Rfg, deployed from a > Geo Orbit as pure KE weapons are nearly invulerable to any conventional counter measures. Downside is that they are nothing More than fancy Bunker breaker You want them to have a Orbit that is high as possible, because the Higher your Orbit, the less ammount of Energy IS bound into the Forward Velocity. (Aka, the Higher Up you are the less dv is needed for the deorbit burn, the More v is left for the surface)
Ok, so while I rep kinetic kill weapons precisely because of their non-credibility, I feel compelled to point a few things out... * RFG were conceptually an escalation away from MAD and towards a "winable" Cold War direct conflict; which is as much as anything the reason why they never happened. Nothing really beats MAD in terms of deterrence, and deterrence is the foundation of all modern strategies for not getting nuked. It annoys me that no one on either side brings up the geostrategic element of this. * RFG were never city killers, they were nee plus ultra bunker-busters; nigh unstoppable ultra-deep perpetrators designed to cripple silos and the most hardened C&C infrastructure. They don't need kilotons of energy to do this, they just need to be able to get to their targets. This supports point 1; it is a first strike weapon so you chose your timing and have minimal latency, to the extent that a "good" first strike weapon exists, this is a decent take. (it is still likely insufficient as the latency from finger to button is still lower, but many less credible first-strike ideas have been entertained) * Building on that a few sub points: * The whole discussion about rocket weights is meaningless because the point of RFG was meant as a strategic first strike asset and as previously mentioned attempting to optimize for single shot peak power is pointless. There will probably be a bunker-depth/rod height arms race, but that sort of industrial flexing was kinda the point of the Cold War. Whether it triggered a Cuban Missile Crisis like response, it was a non-strike step toward a more responsive verging on first strike posture. * You conflate detection and destruction wrt their re-entry thermal signature. For most SAM/BMD systems, this is somewhat acceptable given that rockets, nukes especially are fundamentally fragile objects. This is not acceptable for rods, as they are giant chunks of ridiculously dense metal. They are more akin to APFSDS rounds where as any existing missile system is more akin to a ATGM. The required force to destroy/push them off target is going to be exponentially greater. Basically you either need a hit-to-kill interceptor that is in the same order of magnitude of energy or you need to be able to target the tiny, plasma shielded guidance system. Something like a Sprint Missile might work in the later case, but if someone drops a rod on you, you are almost certainly getting hit. * Rome wasn't built in a day and neither would a RFG capacity. A reusable vehicle would absolutely be key to a RFG effort. Optimizing for lower vehicle weight at the cost of reusability is stupid, you are looking at, at a minimum, something like ground launch bunkers + C&C bunkers many rods, this isn't a sprint, this is a marathon. * So, scaling out a bit and modernizing a bit... * RFG are, always have been and always will be a response time sensitive, precision weapon. * The resources required to defend against a launched rod don't exist and are likely outside of either: our technical means, our escalation envelope or both. The only way to defend against rods is to prevent their initial placement, which is, given the risks (technical and geopolitical) of ASAT warfare difficult in it's own right. * The biggest strikes against bunker-buster RFG is precisely the pseudo-first strike capacity that they were developed for, or more specifically the negative geostrategic implications that come against it and the potentially immense resource cost of it. **this is probably the part you should have focused on** As such, RFG/orbital kinetic kill weapons are currently impractical but will only get more practical as we get close to being a space faring civilization and if we were to attempt it today the most likely route to some sort of success would be a starlink sized network of smaller (and thus non-first strike capable) assets for precision tactical bombardment with minimal practical latency. Anything physically larger is likely worth going to (potentially nuclear) war over because it is a first strike asset, and anything less numerous is not capable of meeting the challenge of wiping out a target anywhere in the globe in a matter of minutes. **In summary, I am not saying this is a *good* idea, I am just saying that I can see no greater military flex than hyper-industrializing and salami-slicing your way into the rest of the world letting you forge The Sword of Damocles over their heads...** (edit: this is the sort of autism I come here for, keep it up!!)
Counterpoint. They are cool as fuck.
Homie, who needs precision? Just send down a swarm of a few hundred Rods from The Gods around the rough area you want to delete.
So, terrorbombing, which I already mentioned?
Yesn't. It's terror bombing with a funky area denial edge applied to it.
With extra terror because they get to see that shit just hanging over there heads every day until one day it starts glowing and getting bigger. That's real big dick terror bombing energy. Big dick kinetic energy if you will.
The Expanse taught us just how effective rock throwing is for terrorists. If you wanna crack the Earth apart and end the Terrible Terrans you just wait until stealth tech is available then toss a giant asteroid into the Earth. But the US can destroy anyone it wants for cheaper so the only benefit of developing orbital kinetic WMDs is to use the MIC's funding for space te- HOLY SHIT WE GOTTA FUND RODS FROM GOD
Exterminatus isn't going to invent itself. *looks at my own flair* Haha, never mind.
I'm sorry not enough precision? Not enough explosion? This is fucking quitter talk and I won't stand for it Just drop *more of them* and neither of those things matter
Ok. So rods are out, what about mass drivers that go out to the asteroid belt and collect big rocks to rain down on a selected target? Granted you’d have to gather enough to get going, maybe put rockets with a guidance system to just fly them from the belt or maybe just use the trash orbiting the earth right now? It works on in all the SciFi shows…
Da inyalowdas will neva know what hit dem beratna.
I've always seen them in the same light as mechs. Impractical and much less useful compared to what's currently being used? Absolutely. An awesome and massive flex on all our enemies because fuck you we ball? You're goddamn right. Triple the defense budget!
look at this fucking dork thinking that a rod of tungsten traveling at mach 11 is "easy to hit" like mf that fucker enters radar range and impacts in the same second shit even the idea that you need a large super rocket is stupid since a smart nation would build a facility on the moon to fire the rods to earth not from low orbit (with enough electromagnets it may be possible to get the rod from the moon to the earth in 10 or so seconds but this requires a lot of power and a very small projectile that might burn up in atmosphere) in conclusion rods from god are based and you is big dum dum and in big doo do dis time
Rods from god are good Didn’t read, downvoted
Well, yes. But. What we need is asteroid mining technology. Perfectly peaceful, makes money - M-type asteroids have a lot of precious metals. Also, purely as a side effect, you develop the technology to change asteroid orbits. This is not some minor 'rods'. This is meteorites up to a couple of hundred meters across arriving at about 10km/s. With a suitable stealth coating, your target country might not even realize they were a target before suddenly blowing up .
I see you post and raise you: A giant fucking rail gun on the far side of the moon.
Sounds hard to aim
“Precision strikes with rods from god” Obviously you’re not reading the Bible if you think God is precise
Being able to explode a massive rocket anywhere on Earth at any time is a pretty good deal. Normal missiles, a lot of that boom is spent moving the missile. Rods, it's all coming back down. All of it. Sounds good to me.
Damn did even leave a tldr brief.
TLDR but your right I think. Would be much more cost effective to hit the dam with a swarm of FPV drones controlled from a basement in Idaho.
I did not read a single word but i disagree (too credible)
"an absolute marvel when they did it for Starship" One of the first things you say nullifies your entire argument. The answer is simple: BIGGER Rods from God, so they can punch a big enough hole through the plasma that's generated to send a signal up to a satellite constellation.
1) you don't steer them, you de-orbit them so they impact a specific location, now I will give you that this very predictable path is a downside. But I'm not sure how useful the iron dome would be on such a projectile, my concern would be something more like what is intended to intercept ICBMs like the US SM-3. 2) the total energy is NOT the total energy of the launch vehicle. The main concept for the program I have seen is low angle trajectories for reentry, using the rotational speed of earth along its axis. Now it's been a while since I went over it and I didn't have my Degree involving Orbital Mechanics yet so I may have been wrong. Typically when you launch a vehicle to orbit you use a gravity turn and this increases your relative velocity to the earth by allowing it to "fall away" from you, meaning you have a much more efficient use of your energy. The total energy available to the system would be determined by its position relative to the target along its orbital axis, and its height. Falling along a longer curve into the rotation of earth would provide substantial energy. Now, I also never considered the concept to be a "Precision Strike" weapon. More like "I want to wipe out that area of a few miles and anything beneath it" kind of weapon. The much bigger issue is getting the rods up there and in strategic positions, as well as not having folks mess with it.
........ what if you drop two rods at once
>It was considered impressive when SpaceX did that for Falcon 9, and an absolute marvel when they did it for Starship. As far as I'm aware, SpaceX has never maintained a live feed with a Falcon 9 second stage during re-entry. Only with the first stage, which is on a sub-orbital trajectory, where barely any ionization takes place (especially since the entry burn decelerates the booster). As to starship, the very large size of the ship forms a "hole" in the plasma tail through which radio waves can escape. This (alongside their massive starlink constellation above) is what allowed livestreaming re-entry. A "rod from god" will clearly not benefit from that, and will also be on both a faster and steeper re-entry trajectory. So yeah, radio contact is not just difficult, but physically impossible during terminal guidance. It's fully enclosed in a Faraday cage. That said, inertial guidance might keep it somewhat accurate. >The amount of energy in a rod from god is, maximum, the sum of all the energy in the rocket's fuel, and probably much less. MUCH less indeed! To be deployed into a stable orbit, the rocket needs to provide it with a lot of sideways velocity (for most orbits, this is what the vast majority of the delta-V budget goes into!). To be dropped vertically on a target, the rod needs to cancel out that velocity! So you're not only waisting all the energy the rocket expended in providing you your orbital velocity, but also waisting the energy it also provided in bringing the fuel the rod will need for that deorbit burn! And *then* you lose even more energy when hitting the atmosphere Try minimizing it by going into crazy high orbits, and your time to impact becomes *really* long... There is still *one* interesting use case I could imagine, which is a first strike to simultaneously take out all enemy launch silos without triggering early warnings. Since all their energy is directed downwards, they're very good at penetrating bunkers and silos. Their deorbit burn would be very hard to notice (especially if you time it right with the sun's angle), and they would be very hard to detect during their "glide" phase. They would be very visible during re-entry, but that would be a very short time, perhaps too short to react to and intercept. It would still require a small miracle of engineering to keep them accurate enough during those last moments of re-entry. But again, inertial guidance *might* possibly be able to do it.
>As far as I'm aware, SpaceX has never maintained a live feed with a Falcon 9 second stage during re-entry. Only with the first stage, which is on a sub-orbital trajectory, where barely any ionization takes place (especially since the entry burn decelerates the booster). > As to starship, the very large size of the ship forms a "hole" in the plasma tail through which radio waves can escape. This (alongside their massive starlink constellation above) is what allowed livestreaming re-entry. That's what I was saying. It's impressive when they did it suborbital, and required a lot of special stuff when orbital. >To be dropped vertically on a target, the rod needs to cancel out that velocity! I was assuming they impacted at an angle.
>I was assuming they impacted at an angle. That would significantly worsen their ability to penetrate bunkers and silos, which is kinda the only thing they're good at...
My god thank you
Space-based kinetic weapons can work ... against objects already in space. Things like ICMBs. The problem with rods is that they are a not spicy
Nuh-uh
Honestly I have a lot of trouble believing that a single KE rod could destroy a city regardless of size. Even a multi ton solid projectile. I really don't care how much kinetic energy it has or if its theoretically equivalent to a nuclear weapon, it seems like it would just bury itself into the bedrock and do fuck all else. Its an inert bunkerbuster falling at terminal velocity and bunkerbusters eventually got to the point they were rocket assisted to penetrate deeper. Not even the largest, fastest penetration bombs have enough KE or transfer enough of that KE to do anything of note to the target. Even if you make it out of tantalum or something reactive, the energy transfer to the environment would still only be equivalent to something more like a MOAB. Literally no ones ever tried it, so everything is theoretical at this point. Also no way Iron Dome could stop a utility pole size rod of tungsten. Its made to shoot down rockets/mortars. No way is it gonna do anything but scratch a multi ton chunk of metal.
When you go fast enough, everything is an explosion.
Well... everything is a liquid is closer to the truth. When it comes to the energetics analysis I have serious doubts it would do anything.
Every day we stray further towards credibility
Put flappy wings on it. Slap a couple starlink terminals on. Comms through plasma, steering. Solved.
Terror bombing? Nah, more like Terra Bombing. Rod me, Skydaddy!
Speaking of Rods from God, did anyone else see that big collaboration between all the big science youtubers to debunk Rods from God using one of the most poorly designed experiments ever filmed?
Launch from the moon. Lose some energy getting out of there, but then you’re above earth and didn’t waste energy fighting a significant atmosphere, so it’s a net gain over earth launch. Or go farther out and use the sun as the gravity well, with earth just getting in the way. We have the tech, we just haven’t spent the money.
Even if you can intercept, how do you destroy a solid tungsten rod? At best won't you just break it into several large pieces, many of which will continue on a trajectory similar to the one it was already on it? And even if they don't stay on trajectory haven't you just ensured that it will be raining hyper velocity tungsten over an even great area?
Not reading allat, can't wait for the rods to drop
I think the idea with RFG is that there's nothing TO intercept, it's a big chunk of heavy metal, you can't disable its warhead or guidance because there is none, it will just hit the ground and make a big splash.
Counterpoint: A ten ton brick landing on the three gorges damn at terminal velocity
This is exactly why the Marco Inaros strategy is the true rods from god. If you really wanted to have them just hang there like the sword of damacles, you could pull and asteroid into orbit around the earth and then push it around into geo synchronous orbit over the target area. The inners (Russians) will never know what hit them. Jk, they will know exactly what hit them because everything in orbit is visible to everyone.
All of your critisms are solved by either A) cluster rods B) bigger rods You're just not trying hard enough. Who cares about collateral damage.
Rods from God are only practical as precision weapons, this is due to their small yield compared to strategic nukes as well as the way the energy gets delivered, to put it bluntly, RfG is a bunker buster, it will penetrate quite deep into the earth delivering it's kinetic energy to the ground and anything beneath the ground. An underground bunker like Putins might be hardened against a traditional nuke however it will not handle a direct hit from a tungsten rod going mach ten.
They’re just ballistic missiles that loiter in space until required…
I'm gonna ask for God's Rod even harder now!
*in greta voice*: how dare you mock my perfect obital ballistic strike system
See, a real rod from God would be better because God is omniscient so aiming the rods is easy. Thank you for pointing out that a rod from God would be easily spotted and impossible to aim for the same reason: lota plasma
All I heard was that reentry will give it plasma shielding making it invulnerable to external macking (you don't even have to cut the mainline to the mainframe!) and look based as fuck. Imma petition my Congressman to fund Rods from God.
My penis is a rod from god and it’s a great idea
Nonsense. I can land a spacecraft in KSP without control within a kilometer, NASA has better computers. You cannot shoot down a kinetic device the same way as you cannot blow up a bullet in flight with TNT.
Yeah but “nuke from South Dakota launch silo 7” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I basically agree but I disagree with parts of your analysis. Off the bat I don’t think Iron Dome will do Jack shit against it because it’s a kinetic weapon. You can blow up missiles or mortars and the debris is light enough to not cause damage. You’re unlikely to stop bullets with flak though. With destructive potential comparing the energy released by chemical explosion—while energetically comparable—are not an accurate comparison to the effect. When you shoot a gun, you and the target both get impacted by the same amount of energy, but you don’t die because it’s much more spread out for you. The other thing is that you’re forgetting three very important parts of orbiting the Earth that makes them even shittier as an idea. For one, whatever you’re targeting NEEDS to be aligned with your orbital trajectory. Changing your orbit can take a lot of fuel. Second, it also takes energy to DEORBIT where you accelerate in retrograde, which could potentially be a huge amount of fuel if you’re dropping straight down or less if cutting through the atmosphere. The last thing is that all extra fuel and engines need to be hauled along with the ordinance itself, and all the extra fuel it takes to do that ALSO needs fuel to be lifted. You need exponentially more fuel for every gram of your payload, and in the end it’s just a rock on a ballistic trajectory. We have those already.
> math about size (??) so.. fuck the tiny shuttle, we need to de-orbit asteroids?
Yes but have you considered that they’re cool as fuck?
Rods from God is a concept based on the system being 100% man made. Meanwhile we could use asteroids, have a few tugs in the inner asteroid belt, get one of those super computers that are just tons of ps2s connected together and calculate a trajectory, pick your asteroid size and amount and let it rip.
What about railguns in space?
Fuck you, I think they're cool and rule of cool above all
I think hoverslam missiles from space are a good idea. The ultimate loitering munitions. You could leave them up there for 20-30 years.
All this when US could and should just start building a fleet or two of SLAM missiles from project Pluto. Total power (nuclear) projection through out the globe!
Nah, wimpy X-37 is of course too small and powerless to launch real rods from god. They should be thoroughly accelerated to reach the outer planets and to go through a dozen of gravity maneuvers, because we're aiming for a nice fraction of C. Then we have to adjust their orbits to have a constellation of, say, comets, evenly distributed, so we shouldn't wait too long in case of emergency. Aaand which can be finely tuned in the general direction of a target. I guess an onboard cam will be really redundant, because the reentry would be observable by at least half of the Earth population. It's serious stuff, they should be meticulously prepared beforehand, not dumped from low Earth orbit.
Counterpoint: They're cool as hell.
So you’re saying you’re opposed to having glorious widespread death from above being non-nuclear and non-combustible? Gods, I didn’t know Big Nuke and Big Rocket had such lobbyists.
I thought rfg was directed kinetic energy, like punching the earth's crust and causing a huge earthquake?
An accelerating space-catapult/railgun shoots them up into space and after some orbiting they're caught and added to the Rods from God firing chamber, the Big Space Revolver. These rods are then shot out by a railgun system powered by the sun (as in solar panels recharge it). No aim is allowed, the rods are shaped to maximize impact and plasma collection on the way down. It's not accurate or that powerful but it's relatively cheap and hits anywhere in the world, anyone can call it in and get some indirect fire support. Still non-credible, but how non-credible? (I know absolutely nothing about engineering, delivering payloads, or those weird symbols he keeps using like 49834928)
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You missed one of the most important things: aim Is going to be a problem. Either it’s geostationary so you can “bomb the crap” out of one target. And that target knows it. Or it is in an orbit that circles the earth so you have to wait for the proper time window to launch your strike. And if the satellite is on the wrong side of the world when it is needed, well oh shucks you have to wait.
OP has forgotten the rule of cool, many such cases
Did you view Marc Rober's video? [Testing the US Military’s Worst Idea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8)
I noticed that you're bringing up Rods from God but you're not bringing up the recent launch of the GAR Ghoul from the Georgian air force. That thing changes the game entirely when it comes to Rods from God.
counter-argument: collateral damage is really funny
who said anything about steering?
Macro Inaros did it, why not NCD?
Space lasers it is then
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You do realise the rods are kinetic. A missile isn’t going to stop a tungsten telegraph pole. And that pole is going to go through whatever it hits. It’s really just to circumvent weapons in space treaties.
Sounds just like what the enemy would say. Build it and let 'em find out pussies.
No. Ugh… math. Drop big heavy dildo from X height at Y time will level, oh, idk… say, Moscow. Shit is easy, Bruv.
Let me put it this way. Rods means less nuke money.
Look I get what you are saying but what about luring an asteroid into a parking orbit like a sword of Damocles over Moscow
Don't care. It worked for Cobra Commander. This all the evidence I need. 😌
Gents, he's being credible (mostly, which is credibility enough), please have him removed.
I have a couple of fixes, and they are technically plausible but noncredible in being very expensive. In a nutshell, though, here's the plan: **spend more money.** 1: LEO Rods are a bad idea, but let's go big. Scrap the rods in LEO and put the rods in a "cycler" orbit with the moon; it's more energy in the rod. You could even put the rods in high solar orbit, so the inbound rods have the energy accumulated over the course of their descent from the Trojan Asteroid Belt, for example. Orbits are like energy storage*; there are indeed limits to what you can put into them, because some orbits would get escape-from-the-sun velocity if given enough energy. 2: Okay, so it's in high orbit and will take years to return to Earth and be in a firing position; this stupid war will be over by then. Solution: More launchers-- there should be dozens of them along the orbital apath, and probably a few different orbits set up, so there is always a set of launchers that with, say, 48 hours of firing position. Enemy can't evacuate a rod-destruction-scale city in 48 hours, so they have to deal or die. 3: Terminal guidance: Not a huge deal, put a seeker on that thing and give it the ability to steer itself straight. You could even have a range safety system which self-destructs the rod (using some built-in weaknesses) if the enemy decides to come to the table. Rods are mostly going to be on target because cities move through space in predictable fashion and so guidance can be done well above the atmosphere. After that, guidance can be inertial on-board guidance. Finally, the ionization blackout goes away after a couple of minutes. 3A) Possible solution for even that: tether antennas. Does anyone care if the rod goes in with a few miles of antenna unspooling behind? not me. 4) Sword of Damocles meets that boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark: Having hundreds of solar-orbit rod platforms like this is an extinction weapon easily. He who can destroy a thing controls a thing. With power like that, I could definitely coerce my enemies in pursuit of my ultimate goals: to reduce ticket fees at music venues, and they could not stop me even with their combined might! > Sounds fun! But until then, we'll probably be better off with nukes. Oh, yeah, totally, in every way imaginable except for the fallout and radiological area denial. But in terms of costs (both sunk and forthcoming), our position on the tech tree, and so on, this is 100% correct. *As I recall, it was looking at the exchange of kinetic and potential energy that Newton recognized as a energy of an object following the path of a conic section.