Space Weaponry

Does anyone know about any space weaponry that exists? Space weaponry that can kill people on the ground?

I know this sought of thing might be secret but any information on this sought of thing would be appreciated.

I dont know if there is any proof they are up there now, but here is a plan for a system that could kill people on the ground from space.

Rods from God

un-manned satellite gunships that would smash earthly targets with non-explosive tungsten rods. They would be so hard and traveling so fast that they could penetrate and destroy a four-story underground bunker.

I have no proof But I think both the US and Russia put nukes into space during the Cold War.

www.inthesetimes.com...

Rail guns are one method of delivering conventional or nuclear warheads.
A one kiloton slug can travel at 4km/s on 6 metre rails, now imagine a mobile one of these orbiting above with the abilitly to launch something heavier than 1 kilogram with satalite guidance could cause some serios damage. Now imagine this had say a 1 kilo ton nuclear warhead? serios damage?

As far as I know the 'Rods from God' are the only 'announced' weapon capable of killing man from space. These have not yet been launched but are planned for future deployment along with other weapons platfroms designed for anti satellite warfare.

Wether or not the US or the former USSR launched any nuclear payloads into orbit I have no idea. Firing them from a railgun would not be a good idea, I would assume the massive electrical/magnetic discharge would be a hazard to the detonators for the explosive core maybe? Anyone out there feel free to corect me on that as I haven't read anything on railgun applications for nuclear warfare. That aside launching a nuke from orbit to destroy a target is not as easy to cover up as the rods. The rods arent that big, I assume they are obliterated with the force of the impact and could potentially be labelled as a freak meteor small enough to not be picked up by radio telescopes whilst in space and radar on earth due to size and speed.

Lasers...haven't lasers been talked about before?? And if there was any way to capture asteroids and then sling shot them into the earth that would be like 'Rocks From God'....I don't think that's possible though, but you never know what's up there do you...

That makes me wonder...that civilian project to be the first civilians in space..I wonder if they encountered any strange approaches from secret agencies telling them to keep their mouths shut if they see *thing here* in space.

What about Re-entry? wouldn't Tungsten Darts simply evaporate? I suppose a railgun would be a good delivery system but a chemical launch system would be efficient since the gravity will do the rest...

The main problem is getting through the atmosphere, no matter what you use, even energy weapon would affected...

I suppose missile systems in space would be best since they can guide them selfs through re-entry...

as for railguns and nukes, I see little problems, I doubt the EM interference will screw with the fuzes for the high explosives so I assume they'd launch a nuke fairly well...

Spaced based lasers....

If they are solid state where they don't need ton's of chem's to make them run then It would work but you would need 2 kinds. The first one would need to be the best and heating air. Needs to be able to super heat the air down to the target to drive as much of it as possible out of the channel that the main beam will be following. The first beam would fire and wile it is firing the second main beam would fire down the path of the first. With the air now thinner because of the first laser empty the corridor of air it is able to get more energy to the target.

The current flying megawatt class laser has a range of 100km or greater and is able to down rockets/mortars/plains
that's shooting though the air at a altitude ground-40,000 feet. The air is very thin up there so it losses less energy to the air and is distorted less. It also has a flexible mirror that compensates for air distortion.

80% of the earths air is blow 18,000 feet so you only have around 4 miles of thick air to go though to reach the target and 90-900 miles of near vacuum. This all depends on how high of orbit the weapons platform is in.

Now for a power supply you would have to use nuke power to supply the needed punch. It will have to be at least a 2-10 megawatt laser to be very effective. You also have to remember a solid state laser most of them are only 5-10% efficient at converting power to laser light. Unless you are going with a flowing gas laser, The Co2 flowing gas laser is 20-28% efficient and can work on High voltage low amperage. So for a 28% efficient laser that is 10 megawatts you will need to have 28 megawatts of power to drive it. You could always lessen this by using capacitor banks to build up then energy when its not over the target.

Chemical lasers on the other hand are up to 40% efficient.

But with the flowing gas laser you would also need a way to recombine the CO2 back together after it is broken apart. But that can be done after the weapon has been fired.

For those that don't know lasers work by bouncing light between 2 mirrors one is 100% reflective the other is around 90-98% reflective and some have a adjustable end mirror so that it can be 100% reflective on both sides then turn off one let all the laser light out in a pulse instead of a long always on light.

Also in most lasers light is wasted because only 1 dimension is used it leaks form the sides top and bottom all that light is wasted to harvest that you need mirrors set up at angles to bring that light back in line with the main laser beam. You also need a good cooling system to keep the laser from melting down.

So if you could get a large laser in orbit lets say the size of large satellite or space station maybe 3 shuttle loads or more 1 being for the laser 1 being the navigation fire control/cooling and 1 being the fuel/power plant. You could if everything worked out right with the proper cooling system, be able to knock out soft targets form orbit with out the fear of return fire.

Of course it would do little good against tanks or hardened buildings but it would work against power/water/supply/trains and the like. Aircraft on the ground or in flight and rockets/missiles. Lets not forget the assassination from space idea either leader walks out to give a speech and he turns to smoking ash. For some reason people don't do so well when heated to a few thousand degrees.

If you wanted to bring fear to a people you could always do long lasing on cities just keep it running as you cross the city maybe with a zig zag pattern just enough power to get things to burn like 1000 degrees C. People would fry, Cars would burn, houses, sheep, donkeys, roofs, you get the idea maybe widen the beam out to lets say 20 feet at full power just enough to leave a nice big burn mark.

If you had lets say 20 or even 10 of these in low earth orbit lets say one orbit every 72-140 min then if you had a target country just line them up and have the pass over the country so you could be firing on it all day and all night 24 hours a day. So each weapons platform would get about 20-10.5 passes a day. Now lets say each one gets off 10 shots per pass. that's 105-200 shots a day for one platform. Now if there was 10-20 in orbit doing the same thing it would be more like 1005-2100 shots a day for a fleet of 10 up to 2000-4000 shots a day for a fleet 20 platforms.That's about 1 shot for every min and a half a day or up to one shot every 36 seconds.

Imagine what It would be like to know that there was going to be a light stabbing out of the sky every 36 seconds and hitting something in your country? How would that make you feel? And to know that you could do little or nothing about it? If your thinking shoot it down with a missile or rocket it would be shot down well before it could even get close. Now as for a ground based laser shooting down the platforms that's something all together possible.

To defend a platform they would odds are have it panted dark and covered with low radar observable materials with some stealth shapes to make ground detection very hard and might even have dummy ones in orbit to trick the ground platforms after the first shot from the ground station that sight would be hit by every laser coming into firing range. Yes the ground has the advantage with available armor but if they can hit the targeting dish/mirror before they can target you then it will be taken out for a little bit until normal forces can disable it.

So in my opinion we well see orbital laser in the future if we lose the current bans on them.




[edit on 6-12-2004 by shadarlocoth]

To my knowledge their is no current orbital weapon system around Earth, but I'm sure they are being developed. News on the forums was the Russians were/are builing a space battle station that would be able to launch nukes at countires.

We need to keep weapons out of space for our own protection, it is far to dangerous to be messing around with at the moment!

Originally posted by GrOuNd_ZeRo
What about Re-entry? wouldn't Tungsten Darts simply evaporate?

Im not sure about the temps tungsten can take but I think they could just coat the rods with the same tiles they use on the shuttle. I think that would be a solution to the problem of re-entry for these rods.

Found some calculations on the web

what kind of destructive power would this thing have? Well, I suppose the destructive power would come from the kinetic energy of the rod as it strikes the ground, and that's given by

KE = 1/2 mv2

Now the velocity is given to us in the article as 36,000 feet per second, which is 10,973 ms-1 so now all we need to know is the mass. The mass isn't given to us in the article but we are given the dimensions so we can calculate the volume. Now this isn't exact as the rods are not blunt cylinders, but it'll be close enough for us. So, converting from the imperial measurements given in the article, we know the height of the cylinder is 6 meters and the diameter is 0.3 meters, thus the volume is given by

pi r2 h
= 3.14 * 0.225 * 6
= 0.4m3

So, using the formula

mass = density * volume

and looking up the density of tungsten on the net, (19,250Kgm-3), we can calculate the mass as

mass = 19,250 * 0.4
= 7700 Kg

Now that we know the mass and the velocity we can calculate the kinetic energy using

KE = 1/2 mv2
= 0.5 * 7700 * 10,973 ms-1 * 10,973 ms-1
= 4.6 * 108 Joules

Which I reckon packs a fair punch! But just how much of a punch? Well, a quick search on the net shows us that it's about the same as 32 tons of TNT or about 3.0 on the Richter scale.
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I am glad they found some alternative to the nuclear bunker buster, wich comes with a lot of collateral damage....

These arrows hit hard and deep, one would need a very wide network of narrow undergound tunnels and moving frequently to keep 'm guessing and have at least a change not to get punctured, at any case these rods disrupts strong central leadership of your opponent as responsibillities and communication would have to be very distributed, organised like cells and using an underground intranet optical fibre to keep communication between cells alive.

For the tunnels I would think of tubes within tubes seperated by liquid to seperate the inner tube from most effect of a passing shockwave (I believe the Japanese have contemplated tube in tube designs for building tunnels in earthquake regions)

Basically the only thing that can save your neck for a while is stealth and many many redundant targets and spare fibre cabling, better start diggin those tunnels now, by 2025 space weapons like these are supposed to be in place....



[edit on 6-12-2004 by Countermeasures]

"mass = 19,250 * 0.4 = 7700 Kg"

now at current costs it runs around 77,000,000+ to get one rod into orbit humm not worth it in my books make nukes cheaper.

I can't prove this, but I heard about a Russian "Platform" that was later uncovered 2 years ago with 30[Probally less if anything] Nukes, but they're old, so they can't do "that much damage", something maybe be like 5 miles or so worth of damage and contamination sense they weren't protected very well and abandoned, I think.

Again, I'm not saying this is true or not, I just heard about it.

[edit on 6-12-2004 by SEAL Trident]

And where was this "platform"?

Like I said, I HEARD ABOUT IT I wouldn't be surprised if the guy I heard it from was kidding. I know, it does sound weird[Obviously, either nobody will tell about it so we won't worry, OR IT'S NOT TRUE, and if so, THAT WAS SAD!!! ]

[edit on 6-12-2004 by SEAL Trident]

you know I was thinking about the rods for god and well I we could build a fast enough rail gun to get a rod into orbit with a rocket to make sure it reaches the target that would cut the cost of getting them into orbit alot. Not to mention sence the gun is based in the states you could bombard countrys for extended lengths of time.

Just think Op1 Op1 I have eyes on the target... cordonates are blabla bbal

This is Op1 fire mission confirmed and rods are otw.

16min-2 hours later the target has a few rods from god rain down on them.

But really how many times did we know where a leader was that the infromation would only be good for a hour or so... Might have saved us alot of trouble in Iraq.

Not to mention that I think it would be a better then nukes to make people think about attacking us or even making us mad.

Well i think i just found a use for our old control rods from nuclear reactors.
Who needs a nuclear warhead when you can just launch spent control rods at them.
I know this is sorta a less than perfect idea but hey they are the right size and shape.

Tractor Beams would be a good Space Weapon. US could fire missiles from space at the Moon and throw bits of debris (with the Tractor Beam) at enemy countires?

But this could wipe out major countries resulting in nuclear war full on, where Humanity either wouldn't or just survive...

in the just-approved intel bill, they've included funding for spy satellites that can disable hostile satellites...

news940.dserv.ca...

"One of the most forgotten chapters in US history is the one that tells the story of how this country got into the space business."

"Army Ordnance Satellite Program" Is just one of the non classified progams. With 6.9 MB of info, should hold most of you over. Just follow the link and see for yourself, remember this is just the stuff they allow the public to know.

ARMY IN SPACE

There's the can of worms, go ahead....open it.

Or alternately, take the cheap approach. When one of your satellites is no longer of any use, just aim it another one and hit the thrusters. WOOSH! Its like space dodgems...

Space Weapons eh? Didn't the US get worried the Ruskies were gonig to build a nuke base on the moon if they got there first? Hmm, space weapons now are jsut going for extreme power. Thats pretty much world domination, no other nation could have the strength to stand up to them. Not Russia, to skint. Not China, to far behind in tech.

All we could do would be to fly old satelites into their ones. (Yeah, im obsessed with that idea now.)