That would involve building a factory in space. If we’re capable of doing that, creating a kinetic OWP with which to bombard the earth would be small ambition.
Gotta mine them in space, but there’s still a whole host of other issues with the idea including aiming them, having enough stations to deploy them anywhere on the planet in a reasonable amount of time, and the other non-radioactive problems that result from throwing a fuckton of tungsten at terminal velocity into something.
I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a removed-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)
Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.
This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.
It’s well within the character of the US federal government and the armed forces to go forward with an OWP platform program right now, even despite the risks and ethics concerns, sadly.
The problem I remember is that it is expensive to get the rod up there in the first place.
Also every other nation would hate us and make jokes about the collective small penis of the US state.
That’s why the eventual strategy would be to build them in space with minerals from the asteroid belt.
That would involve building a factory in space. If we’re capable of doing that, creating a kinetic OWP with which to bombard the earth would be small ambition.
Just slap some rockets to a big enough boulder, Planetary Annihilation (videogame) style.
Also the tungsten oxides produced in high velocity impacts are potentially worse than fallout.
Gotta mine them in space, but there’s still a whole host of other issues with the idea including aiming them, having enough stations to deploy them anywhere on the planet in a reasonable amount of time, and the other non-radioactive problems that result from throwing a fuckton of tungsten at terminal velocity into something.
There was a YouTube video with, I think action lab, where they tested this weapon on a smaller scale with sand castles.
The experiment failed overall because of the difficulty of aiming the payload and anticipating the correalis effect
Veritasium I think.
Yep that’s the channel. Thank you!
Video for those interested.
I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a removed-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)
Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.
This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.
Ah yes, we would do that, definately haven’t already started… no, of course not.
It’s well within the character of the US federal government and the armed forces to go forward with an OWP platform program right now, even despite the risks and ethics concerns, sadly.