Why aren't structures built adjacent to city walls? By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. But Ill still bet you theres a lot of classified work on this going on right now.. Unfortunately (for the concept but not the tankies) no one could work out a sensor system that could see through the plasma around the nose that would be created as the crowbar plunged down from the heavens, therefore insufficient accuracy to target individual armoured vehicles. Background music is Dreams Become Real by Kevin MacLeod, which is licensed under an attribution model. A pair of satellites would be placed thousands of miles above. The losses increase with surface area which decreases with density for a given mass. And then watch the video that explains The REAL Reason Guns . You'll get your explosion. He holds a Master of Public Policy and covers U.S. and Russian security, European defense issues, and German politics and culture. If it creates a more conventional explosion, it would probably be more effective against large groups of soldiers, vehicles, or buildings. The trebuchet was the backbone of successful sieges for hundreds of years, from ancient China to Hernan Cortes subjugation of the Aztecs; during and after World War II, airmen have occasionally deployed clusters of inert Lazy Dog bombs metal cylinders traveling at terminal velocity on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam. General Editor. Rods from God is a theoretical weapon system that consists of a tungsten bar with a guidance system. Little distinction can be drawn between the Hebrew words used for "rod" and "staff." Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. [Podcast: Back Story: Rods from God] So why is there such keen interest in taking our violent ways into orbit? At 7 km/s orbital velocity, each ton of material has a kinetic energy equivalent to 5.8 tons of TNT. Does John 12:25 Teach That We Must Hate Our Lives? The Chinese social media platform, Weibo, for example, faced a good deal of censorship over the incident. 8 facts about Rods of God. A DARPA rendering depicts a supersonic conventional weapon as it emerges from its rocket nose. A kinetic bombardment or a kinetic orbital strike is the hypothetical act of attacking a planetary surface with an inert kinetic projectile from orbit ( orbital bombardment ), where the destructive power comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile impacting at very high speeds. And awesome. Article Images Copyright 2023 Getty Images unless otherwise indicated. Visible from space, the explosion was one of the deadliest in recent times in China as well as around the world. The Most Impactful Gaming Industry Technologies, 5 Trends That Are Driving The Adult Entertainment Industry in 2023, Small Event Catering Etiquette: Guidelines for a Smooth and Polished Experience, How Many Programming Languages Should You Know, Exploring Halal Financing: How to Navigate Islamic Banking and Financial Services, Scientifically Powered Green Thumb: A Look at Modern Plant Breeding. Whether dropped from the sky or fired from a cannon, the principle behind these weapons is the same: hitting the enemy with something very hard and very dense, moving very fast. Rather than shelve the program, control shifted to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The "rods from God" satellite. The Space Shuttle Atlantis touches down at the Kennedy Space Center, February 2008. The X-37B has been described as pickup truck with a payload bay measuring 7-feet-by-4-feet wideor about the size of a truck bed. Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. But such weapons would require a large de-orbit thruster to kick off their descent, likely too big for the X-37Bs payload bay. In addition, because they derive their power from the pull of gravity, reentry angles must be steep, giving the weapon system a very narrow scope of targets at any given time.. You are seeing things all over the place because you are seeing many near-simultaneous impacts. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. From rocks and spears to nuclear weapons, humanity has really come a long way in its destructive abilities. MaTTeh is used of a rod in the hand, as the "rods" of Moses and of Aaron (Exodus 4:2; 7:9, etc.). Since then this concept has been seen in the Call of Duty Ghost Games as well as G.I. The spacecraft is powered by Gallium Arsenide Solar cells with lithium-ion batteries, and it has thrusters for orbit maneuvering and de-orbiting but has no engines to travel long distances in space or for powered flight through the atmosphere. The fuel required to emplace and deorbit the weapons might be about 50 times the mass of the weapons delivered, says RAND study, which the military found to be not totally unreasonable, but still steep not to mention the cost of developing and building the systems themselves. One crucial ChartAttack.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Regulations regarding taking off across the runway. Its a satellite that contains these long darts, presumably made of a very heavy material like tungsten, that are dropped into the atmosphere. The Truth Is Out There. Anxious to ward off an American or Israeli attack, Iran, for example, appears to have buried its uranium-enrichment halls under 30 feet of earth and concrete. And unlike cluster bombs or land mines,Lazy Dogswouldnt remain unexploded on the ground months or years after the end of hostilities, reducing unintended post-conflict harm. The U.S. The airburst was estimated to be equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT, roughly 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This would be a serious explosion. These two payloads, as detailed below, however, were neitherthough that didnt make them any less destructive. Anxious to ward off an American or . Most background footage is from pexels.com on a Creative Commons 0 license. Does a grenade kill you the same way a gun does? The KEP isnt just appealing because of its elegance and relative cost-effectiveness (a super-dense tungsten warhead is relatively cheaper than conventional explosive munitions), but for its theoretical precision. The Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to be 20m and traveling at a shallow angle into the atmosphere at 19 km/s. Sure, if it falls on something, you will have a hole on it. Location determined by GPS and sent to satellite, which can still see the tank(s) No? But if they dig deeper, we can always go higher: hence the call for the Rods From God. More properly known as hypervelocity rod bundles, these weapons would simply be slender solid tungsten cylinders, 20 or 30 feet long and one or two feet in diameter. Termed 'Rods from God', it is a system which essentially drops solid metal rods, typically made from tungsten, from orbital positions. Non-explosive artillery can still have a significant explosive effect. The hypersonic shell is designed to defeat enemy armor and completely obliterate structures and equipment with extreme precision, whether its fired from ground artillery or deployed from an aerial or orbital platform. Contents 1 History 2 The Platform 3 The Rods 4 Trivia 5 Gallery 6 See Also 7 References History This is where China comes into the picture. By the time they reach the surface, they're moving at hypersonic speeds, lets say Mach +10. The violence comes from the chemical explosive inside that bomb sending off a blast wave, followed by the fragments of the bomb case. The X-37B was launched into space for the first time on April 22, 2010, strapped to the top of an Atlas V rocket. The X-37B could also allow such technologies to be used early, in case of a crisis or emergency on the ground. He lives in San Francisco. As an Air Force platform, especially one that resembles an aircraft, its natural to think of it as some kind of exotic weapon system. Those tungsten thunderbolts, as the New York Times called them, would impact enemy strongholds below with the devastating velocity of a dino-exterminating impact, obliterating highly fortified targets like, say, Iranian centrifuges or North Korean bunkers without the mess of nuclear fallout. (12,000 K -> peak at ~240nm which is in the NUV range.) But, as the Secure World Foundation points out, the X-37B is a glide vehicle in its last moments, easy prey for any air defense system along its path to the target.. Is there any philosophical theory behind the concept of object in computer science? ICBMs would also be less expensive and, since theyre stationed on Earth, would take less time to reach their targets. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how can the reader intuit the meaning of "champagne" in the first chapter? TheOuter Space Treaty, a United Nations treaty ratified in the mid-1960s, prohibits signatories from placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner the weaponization of space. What this means practically speaking however is difficult to defineand perhaps insome cases not adhered to. The KEP could offer a middle ground between the conventional precision GPS-guided munitions deployed by aircraft and high-yield, non-nuclear explosives like the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), or mother of all bombs, used against ISIS militants in Afghanistan in April. "Rods from God" is a theoretical weapon system that consists of a tungsten bar with a guidance system. The X-37 was carried by Scaled Composites White Knight launch aircraft with five captive flights and three free fall flights recorded. No doubt, canny proliferators will soon dig even deeper and better-armored holes. As explained by Popular Science, the rods from god were tungsten rods made to be nearly 20 feet in length and a foot in diameter. Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org, argues that the rods speed would be so high that they would vaporize on impact, before the rods could penetrate the surface. Copyright 2023 InsideHook. And that's it. In 2003 the US Air Force proposed project Thor. The Secret Tungsten Weapon Led To the Tianjin Explosion in China Megan Fox And Brian Austin Green Split Over Machine Gun Kelly Rumors, Understanding Chinas Cryptocurrency: A Guide to the Digital Yuan, Peak Energy Nettleie Rate Configurations Explained, The Big Reveal: Insider Secrets About the Casino Industry. . To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. At least one valid email address is required. As to whether ground-penetrating impact is a real possibility, I don't know . This experiment validated warhead performance prior to the sled test. An 85 percent scale version of a notional spaceplane, the X-40A flew one mission for the Air Force before being loaned to NASA for its program concept. Far less than an airbursting meteor but keep in mind that when the Mythbusters blew up a cement truck they used the equivalent of roughly 600 lbs of TNT. Creating Outdoor Areas for Relaxation and Leisure With Wooden Buildings for Google Unveils Revolutionary Immersive Technology, Transforming the Business Landscape, Telehealth Tips for Success in 2023 and Beyond, The Art of Self-Pleasure: Understanding and Choosing the Right Masturbation Cup. International Standard Bible Encyclopedia - Rod. Traveling at hypersonic speeds ofMach 5 or greater, these so-called Rods from God would be so completely devastating, they could totally forgo any explosive payloadbe it conventional, or nuclear. Discover our four plan options Does substituting electrons with muons change the atomic shell configuration? 1915. The X-37 was a full scale craft designed not to go into space but to further test unmanned, autonomous landing hardware and software. The Air Force description was to the point: The rods would provide the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space., The limitations of such kinetic weapons include the fact that, in order to maintain velocity, their maneuverability and target window is severely limited, says, circulated by the militarys Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) in 2012. Thats the fundamental logic underpinning the U.S. Navys highly touted electromagnetic railgun, which can blast a 25-pound hypervelocity projectile with 32-megajoule muzzle energy through seven steel plates and obliterate whatever that armor is supposed to protect. Join PopSci+ to read sciences greatest stories. For Pentagon planners, it could be to counter Russias tactical nuclear stockpile, according to Hix, warheads that could appear on future battlefields alongside conventional weapons thanks to ongoing miniaturization efforts, according to the DoDs Russia New Generation Warfare Study. If I missed or incorrectly applied any attributions please let me know and I'll be happy to remedy it. A couple of years ago, in 2015, there was a destructive incident which made global headlines. The same was the case with many leaders, who were rather obscure about the details. The "rods from God" satellite. Then again, there might be more to this story, where actual space-based weapons were used to bring about the widespread destruction that took place. Maybe it really was the result of a Rods from God technology that was placed in orbit by the United States military, or perhaps some other military power. It would be more feasible to simply boost a badly needed satellite into orbit on an existing rocket. MU Plus+ Podcasts. Explosives may be dazzling in their destructiveness, but theres an elegant, almost Newtonian lethality to the kinetic energy projectile, explains Matt Weingart, a weapons program development manager at Lawrence Livermore. Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction writer and space-weapons expert, conceived it while working for Boeing in the late 1950s; he called the weapon Thor, and as he explained in an interview, People periodically rediscover it., Physicists have observed serious limitations to the idea, beginning with the high cost of lifting heavy tungsten poles into orbit. Looking to the sky for military weaponry is a thing. A Kinetic Strike [1], nicknamed Rods from God, is a space-based weapons system in use by the United States of America. How Does the Book of Ecclesiastes Point Us to Christ? Thats the underlying idea behind a weapon system concept affectionately known as Rods From God and over the years the U.S. Air Force and other experts have seriously taken it into consideration. Toiling away as a Boeing By A rods from god bombardment would probably look a lot like this test of the re-entry vehicles of a LGM-118A Peacekeeper ICBM. Rods From God/ Project Thor - Real Sci-Fi Weapons 21,931 views Jan 11, 2021 436 Dislike Share Ad Noctem Media 16.5K subscribers There are some weapons that blend the line between pure science. The Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored Electromagnetic Railgun (EMRG) at terminal range located at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD). And this is something that will only increase, with the advancement of science and technology. Warfare is as old as humanity itself. On the battlefield, you could do a straightforward calculation about whether the speed or amount of explosives are the most effective part of the warhead, says Weingart. What ever material a kinetic weapon hits only has a limited binding strength to stop the projectile before it becomes displaced. Contact the author here. The idea of kinetic weaponry raining down inert projectiles on an enemy with deadly velocity is far from a novel concept. A satellite and GPS-based guidance system would get around the plasma issue you describe @KerrAvon2055. Unlike previous craft, the new vehicle would include heat-resistant tiles and a propulsion system. The EMRG launcher is a long-range weapon that fires projectiles using electricity instead of chemical propellants. And there are others who say that it was an effort to prevent the Chinese from creating a gold-backed currency, and dumping the dollar. The idea is far from new. Now if someone could only get those space lasers to work. Termed Rods from God, it is a system which essentially drops solid metal rods, typically made from tungsten, from orbital positions. (Not necessarily impossible - but not exactly trivial either, and likely rather low bandwidth.). A religion where everyone is considered a priest. Thats what I am talking about., Photo via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Can I infer that Schrdinger's cat is dead without opening the box, if I wait a thousand years? If not, then the rod would have considerable speed - but most of that speed would be tangential to the vertical drop, causing substantial heat on re-entry and possibly burning it up. Published Jun 7, 2017 10:38 AM EDT. So Is Lue Elizondo. Those are impacts are against metal targets which meet the criteria of the exception case I mentioned. . What kind of wounds would a pulsed laser weapon really create? What makes the X-37B unique among current spacecraft, however, is its ability to take cargo into space and then return them. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. With enough kinetic energy, the explosion will not be "dark". Plotting two variables from multiple lists. Jared Keller While the metal rod will have a much higher binding energy and reach a very bright glow before loosing its integrity, nearly all of this ablation will happen underground such the the light from it will be concealed giving you only a minor flash at the moment of impact. That's 38 times less energetic than your rod. Regardless of what actually happened, the fact is that the truth about the events that took place in Tianjin is not something we can know for sure. Depending on the answer, this kind of weapon would be used on very different targets. Static images are from Wikimedia commons, original concept designs from Project Thor, and the book cover for the book mentioned in the video. 8 Essential Questions To Ask On Your First Date | Get 6 Reason Why You Should Play Casino Games. Proud member Photo via DARPA/Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Worse, the Shuttle took months to refurbish between flights, making it nowhere near as responsive a platform as originally planned. What would be the ideal way to weaponize plasma? They suspected that it had to do something beyond the natural; that it was a man-made incident, resulting from a space-based weapon system. What Are The Top 3 Areas In The Finance Industry Today? Joe movie. The more mass, the more violence.. There are several rationales, mostly variants of the idea that war must inevitably. But then there are other issues that also need to be pointed out, suggesting that it was very likely a chemical factory incident after all. The X-37B is indeed a spacecraft that carries out secret missionsjust not the kind written about in spy novels. . What Goes Up One problem of near-geostationary orbit, however, is the massive weight of the God Rod canisters aboard the space bus. Too big for just an anticlimactic dart piercing into the ground. Sign up now. In an age of rogue regimes and pre-emptive war, states developing clandestine nuclear programs know better than to leave them in plain sight. In theory, the KEP is basic physics, Weingart says, but the implementation is really, really hard physics., Using our high computing capabilities, we can exercise a high degree of control over those effects, says Weingart. a TV show or movie? The concept of the hypersonic impact that defined Project Thor and its devastating potential hasnt been lost on defense officials. Also less feasible is using the X-37B as a satellite inspection vehicle, anti-satellite weapon carrier, and platform for grabbing malfunctioning satellites and bringing them home. Not quite Jerry Pournelles Rods From God, but just as terrifying. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. He called the system Thor and seemed amused that his concept re-enters the military strategy conversation every few years. But with something as heavy as it is moving as fast as it is, the amount of force it has when it hits the ground has to be gigantic.
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