Science, but not as they planned it

[robinbloke]

A while ago in a game that never really started an idea was proposed for the use of low level orbit dropping of non explosive munitions as a kind of carpet bombing technique for insane amounts of destruction. The exact effects of this was thought to be pretty devastating, huge impact craters, massive damage to the local area, etc etc. But we didn't really know.

Now thanks to the sadly faulty parachutes (or battery that was meant to fire them at least) on the genesis project to collect solar wind particles we have a picture of exactly what an impact crater from 80 miles up (thats around 426,500 feet, fact fans) looks like and it's frankly pretty dull, even at an impact speed of around 193 mph

Baring in mind not only is this is a heat shielded object that was designed to come through atmosphere and that it weighed a not insignificant 420 lbs - thats nearly a 1/5th of a tonne the amount of effort required to get the damn thing up there and drop it, not to mention getting this *accurate* as you have around 80 seconds before the thing hits the ground and at that height even a small amount of drift is going to give you massive inaccuracies.

I suppose thats why old aircraft bombed at a generally more favourable 18,000 feet or thereabouts.

Comments

[zotz]

It was designed to slow itself down by atmospheric resistance before its 'chute opened. The proposed bombardment system would have avoided that - it would have been metal spikes, as aerodynamic as possible. Probably still very inefficient, but with an impact speed many times higher than Genesis'.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

You mean I have to wait for a bullet shaped satellite to crash before I'll really know?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_stormknight_/]

Or a spike shaped satellite.

Apparently, the short, spiky blonde hair improves the aerodynamics no end!

[siranui.livejournal.com]

Oh, they'd work alright. Kinetic munitions are theoretically suberb for bunker busting and taking out of strategic missile silos.

What you do is have a satellite with a few boosters for target positioning. You load it with a load of kinetic munitions...
Something like a 10m long solid metal spike would do the job.
At the aft end, you fit steering fins and a GPS guidence system (The US already use GPS guided smartbombs). Then you drop them from low orbit.

The mass and aerodynamics give you a hefty entry speed. The kinetic munition is likely to be very hard to track on RADAR and very hard to intercept successfully. They might not be capable of widespread destruction, but against hardened aircraft hangers, bunkers, RADAR installations and the like, they'll do the job.

What is more, they have no attached casulty-cost. Once you get the munitions up the gravity well, it's also a cheap weapon to utilise. Of course - getting it up the gravity well is what costs the money!

[whiskeylover.livejournal.com]

Flaws with your argument- (And I'm no physicist, just speaking from personal free-fall experience)

1) It doesn't really matter whether you drop an object from 80 miles up or 2 miles up, as terminal velocity is reached after about 3-500 metres of free fall.

2) The actual speed will be more determined by the shape of the object, rather than the weight, so you would not need something weighing in excess of lb 400 for devastating effect (in fact, small but heavy things might be rather deadlier- like metal hail or shrapnell)

3) One of the advantages of dropping at the proposed height would be the fact that you are far less likely to get shot down & less likely to be noticed.

4) If the idea was to carpet bomb (which the Americans call surgical precisison bombing, I believe) then the loss of accuracy caused by a drift would not be that tragic. Anyway, the drift would probably cause less of a deviation than one might think on aerodynamic objects.

5) It might actually be a rather cheap, effective and safe way of attack- very much reminiscent of the catapults of old, but without the modern need for huge expense for explosive ammunitions, and without the problem of leaving unexploded bombs around. In effect, it would be much like shooting bullets down- for what is a bullet other than an artificially accelerated non-explosive munition?

Off topic but

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

you needed to see this:

Re: Off topic but

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Horah! Thank you :D

[mageboltrat.livejournal.com]

The orbital bombardments in Syndicate were made of radioactive rods. This I think is probably a good idea as the amount of radiation spread would be good.

[zotz]

Googling on "hypervelocity rod bundles" finds a few references. The idea is that they impact fast enough to be used as antibunker weapons, but there seem to be practical issues with that at the moment. Thankfully.

[zotz]

Apparently the main problem is getting them through all that atmosphere at useful speed without them melting. At the speeds that seem attainable, you'd be better using a conventional penetrating bomb.

[siranui.livejournal.com]

Ah, but a very large aerodynamic penetrator travelling at terminal velocity still has rather a lot of kinetic energy. It should nicely deal with most hardened targets.

It would be rather difficult to use smaller munitions as you'd experience issues with melting and wind drift - remember the things are being dropped through the jet-stream. Also, it would be a very wasteful way to cluster bomb 'soft' targets. You'd need to register direct hits, whereas you don't need to with conventional cluster munitions. Hard targets need direct strikes.

Have A Glance is -in theory- capable of targeting such munitions. However, it is a lot harder to fry a metal penetrator than it is an incoming warhead, so direct strikes might not even deviate the weapon. Of course, the Americans are the only ones likely to be able to field low orbital kinetics, and they're also the only ones who have Have A Glance, so it's not really an issue!

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Well I've certainl;y learned more about this than I expected, thanks everyone :)