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Originally Posted by Colt
Thor could be built fairly cheaply ... <snip>
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Originally Posted by hammo1j
I think there are far cheaper and accurate ways to achieve the military capability of this device.
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Yes, and each of those ways costs a few hundred thousand dollars to expend <snip> ... And if you had hundreds of these ...
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OK. Let's look at some numbers. Please feel free to correct me if I have made any grievous errors.
Assume your rods are 1 foot x 20 foot cylinders of pure tungsten.
Therefore each rod = 15.7 cubic feet = 0.44 cubic meters (approx).
The density of tungsten = 19,250 kg per cubic meter.
Each rod then has a mass of around 8,500 kg's. The 100 rods you want in orbit will have a mass of 850,000 kg's.
The most powerful rocket in the current US inventory is the Boeing Delta IV Heavy. According to Boeing, it has the capability to loft a bit less than 22,000 kg into low earth orbit. In order to deploy your payload, you would need the equivalent of 39 launches. Each launch costs about $300 million. Thus your total program costs (just to LAUNCH it) will run somewhere around $11.7 BILLION.
And this is a cost effective means to do what now?
How exactly would this be any better than taking a Minuteman III, removing the nuclear warhead(s) and replacing them with a chunk of, ... oh I don't know .... tungsten?
Personally I'd stick with our tried and true methods, which according to you only require a couple hundred thousand a pop.
So the real answer to the original question: Is there any way to stop Rods from God? Why yes, it's called fiscal responsibility.