In Babylon 5 an alien race destroys their enemy’s homeworld with “mass drivers”. Ship mounted mechanisms that accelerated captured asteroids towards the surface of the planet, completely decimating it. In the show they are regarded as heinous weapons of mass destruction for their merciless destructive power.
Cool idea, but shipping anything to orbit is insanely expensive and those are almost impossible to aim accurately. At least with the current technology.
What makes you think targeting would be an issue?
The idea of kinetic orbital impactors is to not rely on an atmospheric glide for reentry, but to brute force straight through the atmosphere to maximize impact velocity and thus energy.
This means you speed up the impactor tremendously, e.g. with a rocket, and ram it straight down. The atmosphere is only 100km thick, and only the last 30km even have any meaningful density to offer noticable resistance. Yes, the impactor will create a massive plasma plume, but it won’t even have enough time to heat up itself, much less ablate or disintegrate before impacting the ground.
Targeting such a device would be extraordinarily simple with incredible accuracy.
This was funny at the time, but kinetic weapons will always have a place. See Rods from God.
Babylon 5 knew what was up.
Can you fill me in?
In Babylon 5 an alien race destroys their enemy’s homeworld with “mass drivers”. Ship mounted mechanisms that accelerated captured asteroids towards the surface of the planet, completely decimating it. In the show they are regarded as heinous weapons of mass destruction for their merciless destructive power.
Wasn’t this commenting on specifically propelling kinetic projectiles with explosives?
Even if they made some kinda super condensed handheld railgun it would’ve also worked the same.
The propellant doesn’t matter. The payload does. Idk why they didn’t think of kinetic force vs energy. Since they absorbed energy.
Hell they could’ve done some kinda sound based shockwave.
Gunpowder. Yes in most cases you have to propel the object. What I’m saying is the physics of kinetics are there, that really can’t be forgotten.
Cool idea, but shipping anything to orbit is insanely expensive and those are almost impossible to aim accurately. At least with the current technology.
Did you see the ships they have in Stargate?
What makes you think targeting would be an issue? The idea of kinetic orbital impactors is to not rely on an atmospheric glide for reentry, but to brute force straight through the atmosphere to maximize impact velocity and thus energy.
This means you speed up the impactor tremendously, e.g. with a rocket, and ram it straight down. The atmosphere is only 100km thick, and only the last 30km even have any meaningful density to offer noticable resistance. Yes, the impactor will create a massive plasma plume, but it won’t even have enough time to heat up itself, much less ablate or disintegrate before impacting the ground.
Targeting such a device would be extraordinarily simple with incredible accuracy.
Also dropping something inert from orbit with any degree of accuracy would probably be extremely difficult.