Rods of God: Futuristic or Primitive Technology

Not sure if this has been posted before, I did a search and hadn't come up with anything.

Anyway, if it is, redirect and delete please

This may be known to some, new to others, but there's a hypothetical military armament designed to be used in outer space that uses assisted gravity to 'drop' solid tungsten rods from space, that reach Mach 5 speeds and have enough kinetic energy to destroy an underground nuclear bunker.

Tungsten for its strength and ability to withstand the air pressure upon re-entry into Earths atmosphere.

The below article mentions these kinetic bombs have the same destructive power as a nuclear bomb.

Actually, a very primitive technology, these kinetic bombs are usually called 'Lazy Dog' bombs. They were utilized in many modern wars. Simple steel balls with spikes attached, dropped from Zepplins, buildings or airplanes.



www.businessinsider.com...

What makes this impractical is the cost of getting the rods into orbit. This would change if one of two things happens.

Someone developes a rail gun capable of shooting them into orbit. They would then be caught and assembled into a useful weapon platform.

Someone develops the technology to mine asteroids for minerals and they are manufactured in space.

As far as question of them being futuristic or premative technology goes? The same could be said of the modern gun. It is just a device for throwing a fancy rock faster, farther, and more accurately.

There is almost nothing truly new, they just make what they think is better versions of old ideas.

I wonder what happens if one of these or a few of them hit the Ocean ?

I would just weaponize the space trash, gather into a pile compact and drop end of story, spray paint it with vanta black and you have invisible trash from space.

Lazy dog bombs are only 1.75 inches long but when dropped from 10,000 feet by a B52 can cover 100 football fields with 3 lazy dog bomblets per yard and go through a truck from top to bottom.

en.wikipedia.org...(bomb)

These and the dispensers were tested by the navy at china lake back in the 1960s for the vietnam war

And the navy still keeps them in stock as they would be perfect for Iranian small boats
and they leave no unexploded ordnance lying around on the battlefield.

As a kid I built model planes and I used ones I got from China lake for real looking bombs on the models.

As for Rods from God they don't have to be solid tungsten rods they could be nickel iron rods with a nose cone heat shield and fins of tungsten making the impact site look like it was hit by a meteorite from space.

originally posted by: MConnalley
I would just weaponize the space trash, gather into a pile compact and drop end of story, spray paint it with vanta black and you have invisible trash from space.

Launch a very small self-perpetuating super-magnet to suck all the Space Junk together first.

a reply to: J1mmyNeutron

how many boosters from old rockets are up there?

all it would take is a 'bump' to push them out of orbit and if you pointed an old booster engine bells first, most of it would survive to ground impact.

And that's not even getting into pushing satellites out of orbit, people say we cant get mass to orbit....ask the NSA and other agencies that launch school bus sized masses to space....

imagine a fueled sat landing in a metro area

Inb4 Zaphod....

You definitely DON'T want to be on the receiving end of that thing. Pretty fantastical and terrifying stuff.

I believe the tungsten rods from god are a "primitive" technology in the sense we likely had them developed in the early 1970's and then deployed to Space in late 1970's to early 1980's, maybe put up before the star wars initiative during the Reagan administration. And then the announcement of the STI during the Reagan years was sort of the official rollout of it without saying exactly what those weapons platforms capabilities are.

My initial understanding was that these rods were shot from a rail gun up in space but I may have that mixed up as I think the rail guns came slightly later. Now we see those rail guns being put on navy destroyer ships that have up to 3 or 4 foot rods magnetically propelled to incredible speeds, with the ability of one shot to decimate a large heavily armoured ship that can be fired from a longer distance then the original giant chemical propelled ordinance cannons.

These technologies, though quite destructive, are very interesting and pretty damn cool. I try to keep up on some of these newer technologies but as we know the newest and coolest stuff is locked up in the secrecy of special access programs and black projects which we.likely won't hear about till 20-50 years later and touted and "new".
S&F OP.

One aspect of the 'rods of god' that isn't all that primitive... they have to be placed in orbit to begin with.
Placing telephone pole sized rods of tungsten in orbit is a bit more of a challenge than a cave man is capable of doing.
Targeting them on a spot on the Earth might present a bigger challenge than dropping ball bearings from a plane.

a reply to: ANNED

That was really cool, I'd never heard of these before today, thanks!

Rods From God are really cool weapons, in movies. The reality is a lot different. You'd get a great bunker buster, but the effects wouldn't be much different from a small nuclear bunker buster, without the radiation, that costs somewhere between $200-300M per "round". A MOP, currently the biggest, non-nuclear, bunker buster in service anywhere in the world, costs about $3.5M per weapon. Rods From God also have the problem of accuracy. You can get a wobble on reentry that will throw off accuracy. So you get a really expensive, semi-accurate weapon that the only real advantage is speed of hitting a target. If SpaceX gets their larger rockets built and flying, and gets costs down for launching then it could be feasible, in terms of cost, and could eventually get down to around $3M per rod. You could get somewhere around a Hiroshima sized blast from a single rod.

Everything is about getting stuff to space so we can kill someone hiding underground.
Game over.

originally posted by: beyondknowledge
What makes this impractical is the cost of getting the rods into orbit. This would change if one of two things happens.

Someone developes a rail gun capable of shooting them into orbit. They would then be caught and assembled into a useful weapon platform.

Someone develops the technology to mine asteroids for minerals and they are manufactured in space.

As far as question of them being futuristic or premative technology goes? The same could be said of the modern gun. It is just a device for throwing a fancy rock faster, farther, and more accurately.

There is almost nothing truly new, they just make what they think is better versions of old ideas.

Actually, Spacex’s Starship is likely to get the cost of payload to orbit down to less than $100 within a few years. That will make this quite possible.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
Rods From God are really cool weapons, in movies. The reality is a lot different. You'd get a great bunker buster, but the effects wouldn't be much different from a small nuclear bunker buster, without the radiation, that costs somewhere between $200-300M per "round". A MOP, currently the biggest, non-nuclear, bunker buster in service anywhere in the world, costs about $3.5M per weapon. Rods From God also have the problem of accuracy. You can get a wobble on reentry that will throw off accuracy. So you get a really expensive, semi-accurate weapon that the only real advantage is speed of hitting a target. If SpaceX gets their larger rockets built and flying, and gets costs down for launching then it could be feasible, in terms of cost, and could eventually get down to around $3M per rod. You could get somewhere around a Hiroshima sized blast from a single rod.

They would probably be actively guided, so CEP could be as low as any guided bomb.

Also, they can be made in a range of sizes; there’s no reason they all have to be kiloton yield devices.

A single SpaceX Starship launch could put hundreds of kinetic energy impactors in orbit in a single go—each one capable of taking out a Chinese warship in the South China Sea, just to take a random example. They could be put in retrograde orbits so the warning time would be only a few minutes. Getting launch costs under $100 per kilogram will be a game changer.

I’m sure a lot of our adversaries are extremely concerned about the Starship.

originally posted by: BerkshireEntity
I believe the tungsten rods from god are a "primitive" technology in the sense we likely had them developed in the early 1970's and then deployed to Space in late 1970's to early 1980's, maybe put up before the star wars initiative during the Reagan administration. And then the announcement of the STI during the Reagan years was sort of the official rollout of it without saying exactly what those weapons platforms capabilities are.

My initial understanding was that these rods were shot from a rail gun up in space but I may have that mixed up as I think the rail guns came slightly later. Now we see those rail guns being put on navy destroyer ships that have up to 3 or 4 foot rods magnetically propelled to incredible speeds, with the ability of one shot to decimate a large heavily armoured ship that can be fired from a longer distance then the original giant chemical propelled ordinance cannons.

These technologies, though quite destructive, are very interesting and pretty damn cool. I try to keep up on some of these newer technologies but as we know the newest and coolest stuff is locked up in the secrecy of special access programs and black projects which we.likely won't hear about till 20-50 years later and touted and "new".
S&F OP.

China had released testing of their version . Its a very simple weopon sytem its drawbacks are its innacurate. To make it accurate means developing a guidance system and at that point you can just mak a cheaper missile. Because that brings us to reason number two expense not only is tungsten rare its heavy to get into space.

www.china-arms.com...#:~:text=The%20so%2Dcalled%20%E2%80%9CRods%20of,from%20space%20to%20ground%20targets.

a reply to: 1947boomer

And then you're running into the issues of ASAT weapons, and counter defenses, and more and more costs. The only real advantage it gives you is speed. A conventional missile, or aircraft, gets you many of the same effects, just takes longer to get to the target. It becomes six of one, half a dozen of the other. The number of times you have to hit a target that fast are going to be few and far between.

originally posted by: MConnalley
I would just weaponize the space trash, gather into a pile compact and drop end of story, spray paint it with vanta black and you have invisible trash from space.

Are you sure your real name isn't Marco Inaros?

Eggs. Simple raw eggs. Dropped from 5,000-30,000 feet. Spread over agricultural and residential centers.

Impact damage ok, but the after effects will render the effected areas untenable for years.

All sorts of nasty biological organisms come out to play when rotten eggs are spread across a broad area.

A farmer with a large chicken coup and a pilots license could render a small city uninhabitable for years relatively simply.

This has been known to the united states government since the 60's, at least that is what was claimed by the person who told me he ran the studies.

Good luck finding the info online. I have tried, but have yet to find any mention of the studies he claimed the dod performed.

The way he told it though, it results in near complete biological chaos and destruction within residential and agricultural centers with little to no mitigation possible.

Pretty much have to burn the whole area or wait a few years after nature reclaims it and hope for the best.

He described near biblical plague levels of insects, rodents, and snakes swarming an arra within weeks.

I saw the footage of the spiders and snakes in Australia durring the recent flooding, and his descriptions of a post high altitude egg drop sprang to mind.

Heaven help us if what he said was true and anyone ever decides to use the ultimate cost effective "lazy dog bomb"

I have ever heard of. A little over 5,500 eggs could cover 1 square mile with one egg per sqft.

That is about $600-700 bucks in eggs a pilots license and a simple dispersion apparatus he described but I will not describe here.

Truly scary stuff and quite frugal.