Basics

Colloquially called "Rods from God," this weapon would consist of orbiting platforms stocked with tungsten rods perhaps 20 feet long and one foot in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on Earth within minutes. Accurate within about 25 feet, they would strike at speeds upwards of 12,000 feet per second, enough to destroy even hardened bunkers several stories underground.

Okay, so I know some are familiar with this concept (and a stupider name I couldn't imagine, call it "Thor's Hammer" or "Mjolnir" or something like originally suggested plz) anyhow, is there anyway one could intercept and or stop one of these things after it's been fired? I know the simplest way would be to stop it BEFORE hand by blasting the guidance system or the platform itself, but once it's falling, could you I don't know, melt it with a laser, explosives, another falling rod?

I know a concern is melted gobs of metal or thousands of super-fast bits of shrapnel but something to prevent it from hitting the target.

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This sounds a bit dodgy since we can't arrange re-entry trajectories for spacecraft that accurately.

Additionally orbiting material does have high energy Ke and Pe but air resistance is going to slow the rod and burn it up at the same time.

I think there are far cheaper and accurate ways to achieve the military capability of this device.

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+-25 feet isn't good enough to drop a calling card down the lum of the Air Ministry in downtown Baghdad. That kind of precision needs laser guidance. However, if the impact velocity were great enough a hollow impactor filled with fluid such as rocket fuel or even water would become superheated and cause immense damage below gound, far more so than a solid rod. (It was the missile fuel explosions that caused so much damage to HMS Sheffield and MV Atlantic Conveyor when they were hit with Exocets during the Falklands/Malvinas war, not the missile impacts)

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Heating occurs due to the adiabatic compression of gas (a great bow shock is formed, with high compression of the air, causing very high temperatures - friction does not cause the heating as it often thought). Tungsten does have a high melting temp - but it oxidizes rapidly at high temperatures - so not sure if the rods would be very large by the time they struck the surface (a lot would burn up in the atmosphere).

As mentioned by frogesque, aiming such a "rod" projectile very accurately is basically impossible - that is why they "fly" the space shuttle onto the landing strip. This is a "weapon" that has no future until your put guidance wings on it. I would imagine it is much cheaper and easier just to take off and land (explosively) like high range missiles do. That can be pretty damaging without resort to orbiting heavy metals above our heads.

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Note that it has tail fins like a Hellfire missile. It could probably be guided to a GPS location with some fair accuracy.

The projectiles as conceived deal with these problems rather admirably. Apparently they are supposed to excrete a coolant and the fins are able to guide them. They aren't just big dumb hunks of metal.

A big laser is probably the best way to intercept them. You'd just need to melt them enough to mess up the aerodynamics, and POOF! The thing turns on its side, breaks up, and doesn't hit the target.

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So what happens when you launch a few dozen or hundred at once? The Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter Hamilton has a nice section where they bombard a large chuck of enemy controlled land with these types of weapons.

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Totally off topic, but most of the damage to the Sheffield was due to the Brits cutting construction costs and building its armour from aluminum and not steel. Unlike steel, aluminum burns really, really well.

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So what happens when it breaks up? Shrapnel like I suggested above? Or is are the pieces too fine and fall slower? I wonder how cost effective these are. Would there only be a few for strong targets, or would it be more like automatic weapons are today?

Don't worry, I know that the heat build up is from compression of the air.

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Not at all, there was no Armour, these were Frigates and Destroyers, they have never carried armour. As the post says it was the rocket motor that did the damage, it caused widespread fires that a small ship couldn't hope to contain, the Aluminium problem was on Antelope a Type 21 Frigate, it used Aluminium in its superstructure to save topweight. By the time this was burning the ship had been lost.

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Thor could be built fairly cheaply and it's much less complex than an ICBM and the nuclear devices making up payload of one. You could put both small and large rods on one platform or just use different platforms. These things could shower a tank formation and totally destroy it without risking any friendly lives. Much better than using tactical nukes.

To deorbit them you could simply use a small explosive in the rear of the rod or a sort of coil gun on the launcher (depending on the complexity level you want). Accuracy problems? Yes, they would have to be worked out. Someone said that the Orbiter was flown in... That's right, it's flown in. It glides, has to avoid burning up. A metal rod doesn't have any fragile organic internals to protect or wings to have ripped off. It's meant to destroy itself.

Yes, and each of those ways costs a few hundred thousand dollars to expend, not counting the fighter/bomber delivery system, and puts one or more humans in harm's way. Thor isn't nuclear so there won't be any fallout. It can't be hit on the ground. It's moving very fast and it's fairly small, you'd need to use a nuke to reliably fry it in orbit... And if you had hundreds of these, it would be very hard to knock them out without having your silos destroyed by counter-battery fire.

Regarding the original topic of the thread: Currently the most reliable way would be to use a low-residue nuclear missile to knock it off course, if not destroy it. That or try to hit it with a conventional explosive-tipped missile which would be much harder. Lasers could work but not as well as trying to shoot down an launching missile or incoming warhead. Remember, it's just a metal rod basically. No volatile fuel to release or pressure tanks to weaken and have it tear itself apart. - Colt

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Earth penetrating radars like the MARSIS around Mars finds the North Korean tunnels and Thor, or the "Rods from God", penetrate 'em. All done without nukes.

I've finally remembered what I heard these things called when I first heard about them (years ago): Crowbars. A nice prosiac, understated name. Short for "God's own crowbars," perhaps .

Fred

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Now THAT is a cool name! =D>

Also, thanks for the input Colt.

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You'd still get some unfortunately large chunks falling on you. They just wouldn't hit the target and probably wouldn't penetrate.

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I've also heard of them being called "Thunder Rods":

http://www.space.com/news/rumsfeld_space_020204.html

Quite a while ago I think there was a thing called "Project Cannonball" that used a very massive object (Maybe a really dense sphere) to see how well it re-entered with a very hig mass to area ratio. DUM?

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.

Given the amount of stuff you're lifting up, and its obvious danger once deployed, I strongly suspect the answer is that any foreign power that feels at all threatened will want to perform the significantly simpler step of taking out the Delta IV on the way up, too.

Alternatively, if that's considered a 'tad' agressive, slap the command centre if they want to press the drop button. Without guidance control, these things are going all over the shop.

Do you have a figure for how much the US alone has spent on developing and deploying nuclear weapons over the last 50 years? Nuclear weapons have to be tested and upgraded, kept up with the opponent. These are metal rods with a guidance system on them. A for just launching one on a Minuteman: If Minuteman missiles could do the same damage without the nukes, don't you think they would have done that? The terminal velocity of the Minuteman is going to be under orbital velocity so it wouldn't have the striking power even if we did it.

The things I was referring to being a few hundred thousand dollars are guided missiles and their ilk which don't have nearly the destructive power of nuclear weapons or what these things would. - Colt

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I remember hearing that the cost of development for the US nuclear weapons program is 3 trillion USD. I can't cite my source as I, er, can't seem to remember it.

So the number may be wrong, but it's a place to start.

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I cannot believe no one has posted this yet, but just to clarify the weapon's characteristics:

12,000 ft/sec = 3,657.6 m/sec (or about 3.7 km/sec) - according to the original post. However, a bit of googling revealed that the rods could be travelling at up to 36,000 ft/sec at impact.

36,000 ft/sec =10,972.8 m/sec (or about 11 km/sec).

So, the apparent upper bound is 11 km/sec, apparent lower bound is 3.7 km/sec.

The suggested dimensions are 20 ft long by 1 ft diameter. On this detail most accounts are similar, as is the proposed material - tungsten. As has been pointed out by formulaterp, this amounts to a gross vehicle weight of about 8,500 kg. However there seems to be disagreement about how much of this mass will survive reentry. All things considered, I suspect that re-entry losses would be minimal. Nevertheless, let us presume 100% survival to target as the theorectical maximum, and 50% survival to target as a minimum.

So, we have an object of between 4,250 kg and 8,500 kg travelling at between 3.7 and 11 km/sec.

Unless I've miscalculated (and it's been known to happen) this gives us a worst case yield of 29 GigaJoules and a best case yield of 514 Gigajoules. Stated in terms of the ever popular "tons of TNT" this is between 6.3 tons and 123 tons.

On the whole, given the purported accuracy, I would see this as a pretty good bunker buster, but also as a very effective ship killer.

Sheki

You're talking about something like Mir? The reason they couldn't predict its re-entry is that it was going to very lightly skim the upper atmosphere and therefore feel just a tiny amount of drag over many orbits. The upper atmosphere is not unlike the surface of the ocean. There are places were the atmosphere was a little thicker and would just touch Mir, slowing it a little, and other places were the atmosphere wasn't as thick and had no effect.

There's no way to predict when all of that will build up to cause a reentry.

On the other hand, what we're talking about here is intentionally deorbiting these rods. That's very easy to control and should be really accurate.

I'd like to make a number of points, forgive me if this might take a while.

1) What is the intended use of this weapon? As I see it the rod's only utility is as an effective bunker buster. And it's rather limited at that. If the yield of the weapon is in the 100 tons of TNT range, we dare not use it to attack say a government/military HQ or bunker located in a populated area. Sure we'd vaporize the bunker, but how about the children's hospital across the street? Or the housing development one block over? We wouldn't need it to take out a single tank, or SAM facility. It's overkill. Besides, the US military has already proven it's ability to wipe out entire Iraqi tank divisions using conventional weapons and tactics. Twice. Use it as an anti-ship weapon? An Exocet, Harpoon, or Sea Eagle can already do the job quite effectively. So basically we're left with Tora Bora as a target. And how many of those have we found lying around?

2) Whatever the vast cost of the US nuclear arsenal might be, and I'm not even going to bother arguing with the $3 trillion figure, it was not all spent for 1 single limited purpose. We developed several generations of ICBMs, intended both to deter an attack and ensure a punishing blow against any aggressor. SLBM's, ALCM's and gravity bombs were built to guarantee the survivabilty of a nuclear response, or counterstrike. We built nuclear tipped air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles to defend against enemy bombers and incoming ballistic missiles. Nuclear armed torpedoes and depth charges to destroy enemy surface and submarine forces. Nuclear tipped artillery shells and land mines (yes, land mines) to stop a ground assault.

3) Refitting an ICBM with a conventional or kinetic impact warhead was never attempted because we never had a reason to do so. As you can imagine, firing off a couple of ICBMs to take out Gadaffi or Ho Chi Minh might have unintended consequences if the Russians weren't sure they were armed with high explosives instead of nukes. However, this is not to say it was never considered. Please see the following link. It's a bit dated and is nothing more than an abstract, but you might find it interesting.

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...pj/london.html

4) Folks are suggesting that our inanimate tungsten rod will have an accuracy of 25 feet. Are you serious? That's shooting at a bullseye only 5 feet larger than the length of the projectile, from an altitude of 200-400 kilometers, after being deployed from a platform presumably in a polar orbit, traveling at a velocity of 40,000 km/hr with respect to the target. William Tell would be proud. You're suggesting using a GPS guidance system and aerodynamic manoeuvering fins. Consider that NASA cannot communicate nor receive telemetry with the space shuttle or Apollo capsules during certain periods of re-entry. Would our rod have the same problem? I can't even begin to estimate the ablative effect of re-entry and it's consequent changes in the rod's trajectory. Once the rod has reacquired the GPS signal, how much time would it have to compensate for these errors while traveling at 11 km/sec? Quite the engineering problem you'd have on your hands.

5) I also have to question the wisdom of deploying such an expensive, and in my mind limited capability, weapons system without considering how vulnerable it would be to countermeasures. The original poster alluded to this scenario. While preventing such an attack after it has been launched may be incredibly difficult, the weapons platform would be a sitting duck beforehand. A rather mundane hunter-killer satellite could be launched into a parallel orbit, close in on your weapons platform, and detonate its warhead. You wouldn't even need anything like a nuke, simply HE and a whole bunch of ball bearings. Ball bearings made of tungsten. Damage the rod-releasing-mechanism, solar panels, gyros, attitude thrusters, communications antennae or onboard computers and your left with 850 metric tons of orbital debris. The Russians launched and tested such a killer-sat back in1963.

6) I hate to bring up cost again, but my earlier estimate was strictly limited to the launching of the suggested mass of tungsten. I did not include the mass of the orbital platform and fuel. Even the best commercial satellites have a useful life of about 10-15 years. So count on periodically replacing or servicing your weapons platform. By the time you factor in research and development, deployment, ongoing operations, and replacement costs, your "cost effective" tungsten rod will have a unit price likely exceeding $300+ million. For the cost of 1 tungsten rod, the USAF could buy over 12,000 slightly less effective BLU-109 satellite guided 2000 lb bunker buster bombs.

Formulaterp,

Not that I am particularly fond of the "rods from god" idea myself, but I take issue with some of your assertions:

I believe you have stated the intended use quite succinctly. As I recall from the gulf wars (both) there was much talk about the existence of bunkers that were unassailable using conventional means. I even remember an analyst at CNN suggesting that there were bunkers in Iraq that would require ICBMs (or even multiple ICBMs) to take out. Around the same time there were stories circulating about how the US military was all of a sudden interested in resuming research on new nuclear weapons. More specifically, they talked of using the existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and/or modifying existing weapons to better serve as bunker busters. It is my suspicion that the "rods from god" idea came up as a potential means to accomplish the same military objective without getting the public all upset about using nukes (presumably the public doesn't mind 0.1 kt explosions, so long as they are not nuclear :roll: )

Yes, but from the military's perspective, those weapons are effectively unusable. They are a deterent to other nuclear powers, but cannot be used to fight in a conventioanl scenario. As indicated above, the rods give a semblance of the nuclear capability, without the same spectre of nuclear war.

I think that the "Russians weren't sure" part of your comment says it all. The Russians could detect a launch, but would have to wait until impact before knowing whether the missile was nuclear or not. As obviously, it is quite a risk to wait and see, they would have to respond before impact. Hence using an ICBM to deliver a conventional warhead would not have been considered wise. Note that the same concern does not hold for cruise missiles - as presumably their launch cannot be detected from afar, even though a cruise missile could easily carry a nuclear payload. So the "rods" presumably offer "nuclear scale" payload without the nukes, combined with undectectable delivery (thereby not provoking a response prior to the detonation).

Well, we just managed to place "deep impact" pretty close to where we wanted it, from an awfully long ways away. So much to say, that all you say is true, there are definite technical challenges, but you have not successfully argued that it is impossible. Merely that YOU could not figure out how to do it. Whether SOMEONE ELSE could manage is still quite open. I would also challenge you to consider our current capabilities for putting "dumb" ordinance on target. For instance, what is the accuracy of a volkswagon sized shell fired over 50 miles, through variable atmospheric conditions, from the rolling deck of a US battleship?

Successfully destroying the weapons platform relies on 1) being able to find it, 2) being able to reach it, and 3) being able to defeat it. As both the US and Russians have a long history of hiding their satellites from one another, and considering other posts that I have seen on this board concerning technologies for same, it is not a foregone conclusion that the system would be easy to target. With respect to point #2, there are a limited number of powers capable of launching a craft that could intercept a platform in low earth orbit, fewer that could hit something in polar orbit, and fewer still that could hit something in geo-sync orbit. With respect to point #3, although the destruction of the target may seem relatively easy, consider this: The launch of the kill-vehicle will be visible, and destroying the target would be akin to a direct attack on US assets (much like a pre-emoptive stike against US missile silos). So it might not be such a good idea to attempt it unless you are already at war, or wishing to start one. Second, as it is unlikely that you will know what the platform has for defensive capabilities, and the amount of damage that it can sustain, one might be ill-inclined to attempt such a strike.

Don't be sorry for hammering on cost, it is probably the best argument against the system (and likely the reason why it doesn't already exist).

Nevertheless, there are targets that BLU-109's cannot handle (think NORAD and the like). As I stated earlier, for the military the possibility of "nuclear level" capability that is "non-nuclear" carries quite a premium. Add to that the fact that you can presumeably hit any target, any time, on 15 minute's notice, without putting US servicemen's lives at risk...


Sheki

Tungsten. Phew, that is a relief. I though this thread was going to be about Rod Stewart. I have been hoping for a defense against him, but he keeps coming back for another tour. I do not think I can survive another crooned rendition of "Maggie May".

But you need an HLLV to put enough up there in a nice big platform :wink:

Sheki,

I agree with you in that such a weapon would provide a near nuclear capability without actually resorting to nukes. I still maintain that there aren't that many targets which would require such a capability. Note to evil dictators: Don't build your secret bunkers out in the middle of nowhere, build 'em under your most populous city. They'll be safe there from Thor's Hammer.

I'd like to answer some of your counterpoints:

Regarding Deep Impact: Apples and oranges. JPL had months to prepare and make course corrections with the probe. The impactor's flight time was around 24 hours, during which it retained 2-way telemetry and constant radar tracking. In addition the impactor was not flying through an atmosphere. Parts of it weren't melting away, changing it's mass, coefficient of drag or center of gravity. Given the expected impact velocity, any comm systems on the rod would be blinded by a buildup of plasma as soon as it hits atmosphere. It would never slow down enough, unlike STS or Apollo, to reacquire any GPS or command signals. Whatever trajectory effects it undergoes will only be known when something goes boom!

The Iowa class battleships' 16'' guns had an effective range of about 25 miles. Using the latest tracking radars and fire control systems available at the time (this is the late 80s not WWII) they could land their shells within 100-200 meters of the intended target. This after a half-century of development. Modern strike aircraft have similar capabilities with unguided ordinance at high altitudes. Laser, IR, electro-optical or satellite guided ordinance have substantially greater accuracy, but nearly all of them travel at subsonic speeds. Folks are suggesting an accuracy of 8 meters with our tungsten rods travelling at near Earth escape velocity.

1) Nearly impossible to hide something like this. This Sep/Oct a Titan IV will launch a classified NRO payload from Vandenburg. Check Usenet about 24 hours later. Amateurs around the world will have been visually tracking it and will provide orbital elements for you. In fact, unless I've made an error, the NRO's Lacrosse 5r radar-recon satellite will be crossing the Chilean coast about the time I hit the "Submit" button for this post.

2) True not everyone can launch a killer-sat. The smallest country GNP-wise that can do it is India with her PSLV, perhaps the DPRK too. Developing or buying the capability would cost far far less than developing the rods themselves. And it would have to be in polar orbit, putting it in GEO limits its effective area coverage. Not to mention the fact that Energia, the most powerful rocket ever flown, would be hard pressed to put 3 of your rods into GEO. Only publiusr would relish this fact. Speaking of GEO ... companies like Arianespace or Sealaunch are very experienced at putting satellites into precise locations/orbits. For them, being off by 10 km's in any direction is considered accurate. Totally unrelated I know, but keep that in mind when you want hit within 8 meters of your ground target.

3) Attacking the platform would be an act of war, but then again so would dropping one of those rods on foreign soil. Stalemate. And you want to put armor on your platform? Lasers? Or a seperate killer-sat as a defensive escort? It's heavy and expensive enough as it is.


In summary, such an weapons system is possible, but probably not practical. Something along the lines of "big toys for big boys."

As Formulaterp so eloquently explained, any foreign power will know where the satellite is. Tracking it, even without a pre-emptive strike, means they'll know when you've let one loose. The most you'll be able to obfuscate things is to make it more work than it's worth to calculate whether it's them that you've aimed at, and the response is on the way.

Publiusr:

Actually, are we sure that "a nice big platform" would be the way to go? Could a dispersed deployment make better tactical/strategic sense? A rod, here, a rod there, everywhere a rod rod...

If each "platform" consisted of a single rod plus small antenna and a de-orbiting charge it could improve the chances of hiding it, no? Or perhaps develop a nice new spysat that just happens to have a big tungsten rod attached to it that no one but a select few knows anything about.

Formularterp:

If it is a bunker buster (ie. the explosion is mostly underground), collateral damage may not be so high, even in the case of a miss. Also, I would not necessarily rule out using these things to strike populated areas. Sometimes you gotta break some eggs.

OK, I'll accept that. However,

You are still arguing "technologically impossible". As with most technological problems, I suspect it just depends on how much money they are willing to throw at it. (Note: it is a pet peeve of mine when someone, such as yourself, declares definitively that "it is not possible!" Especially considering how many times over the years that similar statements have proven false).

Re: the battleship specs - OK you're right. I should have looked up the specs myself before posting that.

Re: hiding satellites:
So says you.

The amatuers will be able to track something, that's for sure. Whether it is the entire payload or not, well I wouldn't be so sure. Or perhaps the rocket will fail, supposedly sending the payload into the sea or some such.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/...s/zirconic.htm

Quotes from article:

"stealth satellite programs such as MISTY (AFP-731) and PROWLER"

"The satellite, funded under a classified program known as Misty, was first revealed by Jeffrey T. Richelson in his 2001 book “The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology.” Richelson claimed that the first craft was launched on March 1, 1990 from the space shuttle Atlantis."

All you can say for certain is that "you know about all of the satellites that you know about." Whether that includes all of the satellites currently up there or not is a matter of speculation.

This is not a stalemate at all. The rods provide a first strike capability. The fact that someone can defeat your first strike capability at any time only counts if they can do it AFTER you have decided to use it.

I wholeheartedly agree. And that is exactly why the US would want such a thing. Nothing says "greatest superpower on the planet" like being able to drop a $300M rock on your head from orbit whenever the mood strikes them!

Sheki

You don't just launch one HLLV, but several good sized platforms in several orbits. The latest Titan IVs cost a billion a shot--as much or more than Saturn V even.

Plus some missile defense money would have dual use--as opposed to questionable ground-based missile defense systems.

Rods also save on logistics by reducing bases in other countries.

Run it all out of Cheyenne Mountain.