Kinetic Missile

[All Seeing Eye]

I was thinking about weaponry and how to make some kind of missile or bomb that could cause nuclear size devastation but without all the radiation so I came up with an idea and figured I'd ask you guys if it might be possible.
Ok first off you build a huge rocket/missile with a conventional explosive warhead and launch it into space and towards the moon, you use large amounts of fuel to try and get it to go as fast as possible and then you slingshot it around the moon to gain even more speed and aim it back at the earth, now this missile will be made from seriously tough alloy and heat proof shielding. Anyway by now it'll be travelling back to the Earth at some serious velocity. Now the whole idea basically is for that missile to then blast into the Earth atmosphere targetting a city or whatever and then hitting the ground at such a speed and force that it causes a massive kinetic explosion ripping half the city to bits.

Could it work?

 

[JNG]

You could get it going pretty fast with a scheme resembling this one. The final "projectile" phase would need to be pretty massive to have the kind of impact you are seeking, and a tremendous amount of fuel/boosters/whatnot would be required to get it up there and get it moving quickly, making the launch weight even higher. Ultimately, it may be possible but not practical--I'm not sure the resource expenditure would end up being less than the sum total of the manufacture and deployment of a small nuclear weapon plus the cleanup after its use.

I guess ERW "neutron bombs" might shift the scales in favor of use of nuclear weapons instead.

 

[JustAFriend]

The "Rod from God" kinetic energy weapon has been tossed around since the 1950s....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_God

In the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, the citizens of the moon bombard the earth with cargo containers sent from the moon's surface down to the earth, using Kinetic Bombardment.

 

[Lindley]

This is also the basic idea behind the rail gun. Not the moon part, the "KE beats high explosives" part.

 

[RaulMacca]

The amount of time the weapon would be open to attack would be far to great, if someone built such a weapon someone would build several cheaper interceptors that would get it on the return leg of it's trip.

 

[Lonemagpie]

It's an old idea, not used often enough in SF settings that have FTL velocities.

ISTR Heinlein used it (in a non-FTL setting) in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, using magnetic accelerators to throw junks of moonrock at Earth. (cf also the Centauri's use of mass drivers for orbital bombardment in B5)

Personally I always wonder why the Empire in Star Wars bothered to build the Death Star when all you'd have to do is fill an old freighter with the densest ores you can find, point it at a planet, and press the lightspeed button...

 

[Lindley]

Personally I always wonder why the Empire in Star Wars bothered to build the Death Star when all you'd have to do is fill an old freighter with the densest ores you can find, point it at a planet, and press the lightspeed button...

Admiral Daala considered doing that to Coruscant with one of her last remaining Star Destroyers, actually. Probably would have if someone hadn't destroyed the intended ship first.

 

[USS KG5]

Kinetic weapons technology seems to bew the in-thing at the minute, as the new US missile defense shield depends partly on essentially ICBMs with no warhead hitting other ICBMs which have them.

Funny story - one of the rumours about the Falklands War which comes under the heading "probably not true but would be funny if it were" is that Thatcher planned that if the landings on the Falklands had failed to drop a nuke on Buenos Aires.

First though she would have had them strip off the warhead from a Polaris missile and send it into the Argentinian capital without a warhead, promising a nuke next time if they did not withdraw. It would probably have caused significant damage even without a warhead, we are of course talking a very big missile!

 

[RaulMacca]

We still had a few free fall nukes back in '82 that sailed with the fleet and were stored on the carriers, I presume Harriers or buccaneers must have been able to carry them.

More proof the Argies didn't sink HMS Invincible as many of them seem to think they did, had they hit it with a missile we'd have all seen the explosion.

 

[USS KG5]

We still had a few free fall nukes back in '82 that sailed with the fleet and were stored on the carriers, I presume Harriers or buccaneers must have been able to carry them.

I think the nukes were taken off the carriers as they sailed, but the only effective way to get a bomb into Argentina would have been Polaris. If the carriers had sailed close enough to launch Harriers then they would have been instantly sunk, and Vulcans would be relatively easy prey if they tried it.

Buccaneers had all been transferred to the RAF or withdrawn by 1982. The only fixed-wing aircraft available to the carriers was the Harrier, in both FRS1 and GR3 guises.

More proof the Argies didn't sink HMS Invincible as many of them seem to think they did, had they hit it with a missile we'd have all seen the explosion.

They are convinced they hit and crippled her, but they didn't and we all know that, ironically had it not been for Atlantic Conveyer being all big-and-targety they might have sunk Hermes.

Oh, and as I'm sure you know nukes don't work that way. The odds of triggering a nuclear weapon accidentally in an explosion are incredibly small.

 

[RaulMacca]

The odds are small normally but this is a war in which HMS Invincible was sunk and rebuilt in secret by the Americans before sailing it back to England just in time for the war to end, what are the odds on the yank ship engineers pulling off that trick, smaller I'll say than setting of a nuke

 

[USS KG5]

The odds are small normally but this is a war in which HMS Invincible was sunk and rebuilt in secret by the Americans before sailing it back to England just in time for the war to end, what are the odds on the yank ship engineers pulling off that trick, smaller I'll say than setting of a nuke

Well quite...

 

[Timo]

...OTOH, there's the other, almost plausible rumor about the retiring HMCS Bonaventure swapping places with INS Vikrant in 1970, just in time to allow the Indians to sail their carrier in anger against Pakistan (something the original, "real" Vikrant might have been hard pressed to do due to a cracked boiler).

Not much to do with kinetic missiles, I know, but it's still my favorite tin hat story. We need a RCN/CFMC veteran or three to go to the Vikrant museum now and lay this one to rest, one way or another...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS KG5]

We need a RCN/CFMC veteran or three to go to the Vikrant museum now and lay this one to rest, one way or another...

Timo Saloniemi

Makes you wonder why no-one has spotted the swap if true. While ships of the same class have similar external appearances anyone who has served on either ship could presumably easily identify one from the other with a quick tour.

 

[Timo]

That would probably depend on the extent of the tour being offered.

Both ships received essentially identical upgrades before ending up in their respective end users' service, and OTOH one would assume the Vikrant would have kept on receiving various upgrades (even if purely cosmetic) after the supposed swap, right until the 1990s retirement.

The thing is, the Bonaventure was stripped of much of her gear before being sent to Taiwan for scrapping - a trip on which her movements are poorly accounted for, and allow for the swapping theory. So some telltale signs would have gone missing at that point.

There are other similar stories of major hardware swaps. The Aurora of Russian revolutionary fame, for example. Or the Titanic. There's a massive conspiracy theory on how the passenger liner that sunk was actually the damaged and poorly performing Olympic rather than the better built and pristine Titanic, the names having been swapped early on during the construction of the latter so that an insurance scam could be pulled on the former. (The accident would still have been an accident, not a deliberate sinking - but the poor condition of the Olympic would have been a factor in allowing the plating to buckle, either at the iceberg impact, or as the result of some other kind of calamity altogether.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS KG5]

That would probably depend on the extent of the tour being offered.

True - though major differences even in internal layout are likely I'd have thought.

There's a massive conspiracy theory on how the passenger liner that sunk was actually the damaged and poorly performing Olympic rather than the better built and pristine Titanic

Thats a bit less believable though...

 

[Alpha_Geek]

OP, try reading some of these, courtesy of wikipedia:

• In the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, the citizens of the moon bombard the earth with cargo containers sent from the moon's surface down to the earth, using Kinetic Bombardment.
• In the book Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, aliens drop the Thor system on an American armored division.
• British author Peter F. Hamilton describes in his The Night's Dawn Trilogy, a weapon called a kinetic harpoon that is deployed from orbit and is used for precision strikes. The effect of the weapon can be enhanced by deploying several projectiles in a precisely calculated pattern as to produce shock waves in the ground leading to an artificial earthquake.
• In the computer game Syndicate Wars, an all-powerful corporation called Eurocorp possessed the "Satellite Rain" weapon, which consisted of rods of a heavy metal alloy that could be fired from satellites. The rods would partially melt in the atmosphere and then strike in the target area at extreme velocity, causing massive devastation.
• In the Shadowrun universe novel "House of the Sun" by Nigel D. Findley (Paperback -- July 1995), Project Thor is referred to as well as employed by suspected megacorporations when tensions on the island nation of Hawai'i rise and a war almost begins between the nation and several mega-corporation and criminal organizations.
• Also in the Shadowrun universe, there are "Thor shots" which work as described above. One was used against Art Dankwalther, a man who was in the midst of economic warfare against a mega-corporation. In-universe characters have commented on that occasion being a literal definition of "overkill."
• In the book Star Wars: Shatterpoint, author Matthew Stover describes the "De-Orbiting Kinetic Anti-emplacement Weapon" or DOKAW, which consists of a continually orbiting metal rod with maneuvering rockets attached that can be called down on command to strike enemy targets.
• In issue 12 of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency comic, Miranda Zero and a hastily-assembled team of operatives race to stop the firing of a tungsten rod at Chicago from a malfunctioning secret orbital platform built by America's Strategic Defense Initiative.
• In the book Quantico by Greg Bear, pods of "Orbital Weapon Lancetes" (OWL) were used to destroy terrorists at Mecca. The OWL program was originally designed in the book to be "bunker buster" weapons.
• In The Dresden Files, a character pulls an Ex-soviet satellite out of the sky, and onto his enemy
• David's Sling by Marc Stiegler (1988) described both anti-armor 'crowbars' carried by AI driven UAVs and orbital anti-silo 'pole' kinetic energy projectiles.
• In the Command & Conquer: Generals - Zero Hour modification C&C ShockWave, Superweapons general Alexis Alexander has a Generals Power ability that delivers an orbital tungsten rod strike from a satellite.
• In Kane's Wrath, the official expansion pack to Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, it has been confirmed that the Global Defence Initiative will have access to Orbital Artillery, which functions in much the same way as Kinetic Bombardment.
• In the upcoming Tom Clancy strategy game EndWar, it is implied heavily in the CG trailer that the US faction may have access to Kinetic Bombardment weapons. The main character of the trailer calls down such a strike (even going so far as to call it by this name) on his location in Paris, France, and the weapons are shown to be fired from their platforms and assisted in to the atmosphere by a rocket motor. Also in the novel Kinetic strikes are used several times and the weapons were identified as Rods from God.
• In The Shiva Option by David Weber, the Grand Alliance uses several large asteroids to obliterate one of the Arachnid "Home Hive" worlds.
• In the Honor Harrington series of novels by David Weber, orbital kinetic bombardment is banned under the Eridani Edict; any offending parties find themselves automatically at war with the Solarian League, by far the most powerful political entity in the Honorverse, at least on paper.
• In Dale Brown's dreamland series Thor weapons are used to attack ICBM's, space planes and ground targets. They are accelerated by compressed gas for use on exoatmospheric targets.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Interesting except all those methods are totally out there, as in not likely to happen or happen anytime soon. My idea could be accomplished now with todays technology.

 

[Timo]

Except that we don't have a moon rocket right now. And what we do have would probably be better used in placing those Rods of God in low orbit, then propelling them down with their own rockets rather than with a slingshot maneuver: the destruction would be more controlled, or more widespread, depending on how one aimed the rod swarm, and you'd be likelier to get rid of the target.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Except that we don't have a moon rocket right now. And what we do have would probably be better used in placing those Rods of God in low orbit, then propelling them down with their own rockets rather than with a slingshot maneuver: the destruction would be more controlled, or more widespread, depending on how one aimed the rod swarm, and you'd be likelier to get rid of the target.

Timo Saloniemi

The shear power of a huge metal projectile slingshotted around the moon and striking the Earth at massive speed would out perform anything else. We could take out an area the size of 3 cities if the velocity is high enough, IN ONE STRIKE!