Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
For some fun reading look up the "Rods from God" weapons platform. The basic idea of "Rods from God" is to put some telephone pole sized tungsten rods in orbit and then drop them on targets on the ground. Because of their size, shape, and composition they barely decelerate coming into the atmosphere and they hit with the equivalent force of a small nuclear weapon without any of the fallout.
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I'm familiar with them, and they have issues that their fans tend to overlook. The first being that you can't just 'drop' them and de-orbiting them in a useful time and a useful impact vector actually takes a fair bit of delta-vee. If nothing else this makes the de-orbiter relatively large, and the de-orbit burn obvious.