Rods From God - Real or Myth?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- Rods from god is a theorized weapon that does not officially exist. In 2003 the US Air Force proposed project Thor. Since then this concept has been seen in the Call of Duty Ghost Games as well as G.I. Joe movie. This concept is known as kinetic bombardment.
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Conspiracy theory time, the reason the cost to get 1lb into space is so high is because they've been secretly transporting tungsten rods the whole time
oooooo I like it!!!
I like your brain
Actually the reason it cost so much to get 1lb into outer space is because the deceptacons made it so expensive no one would ever want to go back so they can move their pillars and warp Cybertron in secret to save their race.
Could easily do it send em up in pieces and screw em together in orbit, and the satellite? Hubble telescope my friend we launched it and had to send a team shortly after to "Repair It" IE load that bad boy up.
True or not, the entire concept is actually kinda dumb.
We can spend billions of dollars to launch a Tungsten telephone pole into space Ooooor…we can spend 1/10th as much to build and deploy a conventional warhead on a cruise missile or some other munition via standard logistical pathways.
It’s a fun theory but in practice, Rods from God would be a totes redonk way to waste dollars.
My dad is a 30 year veteran cop, a huge history buff, and over the course of the past 6 months it’s become our thing to watch TFE vids and talk about history. Thanks man, for giving us some great content to spend some quality father/son time with.
ask him if he knows about Project Northwoods
This deserves way more likes.
Fuggin awesome!!
The way you deliver your content is priceless. This channel is 10/10 for sure.
This applies to anything the military does: "It's not real, we heard about it, it's very likely real and they're making an even better one you can't even imagine."
classified
If your hearing about it its already 5-15 years of R&D behind
As Stargate SG1 put it "plausible deniability"
@@kuhljager2429 You’re the second fucker to mention SG-1 in this comment section. Now I gotta re-watch that show. Man, that’s gotta be my favorite tv show of all time. Welp, I’m gonna be lost for the next week.
@@chrisryan3460 absolutely. They wanted this back in the 90s. "Star Wars" defence system was conceptualized in the 80s and determined to be unfeasible. This was the next idea on someone's desk that got greenlit for development.
Project Thor was thought up by Jerry Pournelle in the 1950's while he was a working in operations research at Boeing, before he became a science fiction writer. This involved dropping telephone pole sized tungsten rods from orbit.
jerry pournelle thought it up. my grandfather engineered it. he said pournelle was the smartest human in most conversations.
MJOLNIR is the only system to utilize the SMART ROCKS system, rather than the currently used BRILLIANT PEBBLES.
There was a General in the US Air Force in the 1950s who had this idea after Sputnik, but it was dismissed as 'implausible'. Pournelle may have had a hand in that, not sure. The ONLY true problems with this idea then or now are getting them into orbit in the first place and then targeting. The idea was and is a good one. Why waste power or expensive tech when you can use a rock?
I didn't realize Project Thor went quite THAT far back.
But the whole kinetic weapon concept goes at LEAST as far back as early E. E. Doc Smith, in both his Lensman and the Skylark of Space series, a decade or two before that.
@@firbolg1581 Just don't get me started on his negative characteristics.
I had the misfortune of meeting Jerry once at a Science Fiction convention.
He had a young - I presume woman, she was borderline by appearance - on his lap at the time, NOT his wife.
Something worth noting is that a streamlined rod (ie, raindrop shaped) with the same cross sectional area and mass would reach ~Mach 22.7. This gives a KE of around 160 tons of TNT. That’s still nowhere near as much as a nuke, but it’s also a helluva lot of energy.
The Davy Crockett carried a payload of approximately 20 tons of TNT so, yes, assuming that math is right it would be equivalent to about 8 small nuclear devices.
Assuming the cost per pound got to the 100usd mark they suspected, that would make each impact cost ~2 million usd. (which, 2 million USD to bitchslap a location with 8 small nuclear devices is pretty fair as is) While that still sounds like a lot, there is another factor in that "cost per pound" metric that I'm not sure has been considered. First and foremost is economies of scale. As it stands, all the innovation is basically being done by SpaceX at this point, not NASA. If NASA wanted to I'd bet good money autonomous re-usable reloading ships could be done by now if they were needed. If there *_was_* the necessity to do something like that, I bet we could have. As far as I can tell right now the price is still around the sub 5k mark, buuuut those rockets all seem to need to be human crewed, which means life support systems, you need to keep acceleration in check, temperature in check, etc. If you just need to reload one platform, any manpower necessary could just stay on the station and you could use a combination of AI and remote controls to guide it in.
So keeping that all in consideration, yeah, the 100usd mark may be viable, at least for a single hyper-specialized role like this. If they could hit that mark, you're looking at the price of a few missiles to drop 8 unavoidable unstoppable small nuclear warheads on someone.
I wonder what the ballistic coefficient would be for a rod like that... As always great stuff.
there's actually a ton of people that have nerded out and done all the math online if you care to look
We've done the math before, its surprisingly low. Far lower than the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
@@xdeepxfreezex2621 umm...I don't think you know what ballistic coefficient means...
@@neverlistentome
deepfreeze, Is referencing the impact energy. Based on the rod being solid tungsten carbide it's terminal velocity the impact energy wouldn't be much more than a scud or patriot missile. HOWEVER, people often forget that the rods could be doped with other materials to create environmental hazards or increase their yield.
As to the ballistic coefficient, well it would functionally be infinite upon release. As the drag increases, lower in the atmosphere where it is more dense, the BC would drop and rapidly. Although, by that time the rod in moving so fast that it doesn't really matter.
And drag coefficient since at Mach 5 the shockwave would be well behind the projectile. Buh.
"Buh, a magnetic accelerator could make it hit faster, buh."
Yeah, and it would be heavy as fuck and obscenely expensive to put into orbit. Also, a magnetic accelerator for one of these theoretical tungsten rods would be massive and easily tracked by Russia as well as anyone else with a telescope.
fax
at that point you might as well just build a space battleship with a spinal mounted main gun
@@The_Racr1 _Space Battleship Yamato theme intensifies._
@@danielseelye6005 hehe Space battleship Yamato go brrrr hehehehehe
Also thanks to newton course correction would be a nuisances
During GW2 I was stationed at Edward's AFB where we tested new weapons systems. Getting the GPS fin kits dialed in to the point they could bullseye telephone poles someone got the genius idea to use practice bombs to take out targets parked next to sensitive sites. Turns out you don't have to go all the way to orbit, 40,000ft is far enough when we are talking about a 2000lb JDAM filed with concrete. Punches holes clean through buildings and tanks without obliterating everything nearby.
You chucked metal wrapped Roman columns at stuff, and got paid for it. That sounds fun.
And thus the knife missile was born!
@noanswer1864 Sadly no. Working on B-1s is the desert for six years was pretty miserable.
@@noanswer1864 I dub it the "Samson" Dumbweight Ordnance Device.
this is basically just the caveman version of a railgun, and why the fuck is it not in active use that sounds useful as fuck. I mean, even if we want to scale the project down, imagine a semi truck just *_filled_* with football sized metal darts and half a dozen super-capacitor powered drones that can pick one up and charge at the same time, fly it a couple hundred feet into the sky, drop it, come back down, and reload. Then take your pick between HE, fragmenting, incendiary, flashbang, etc. and you basically have the ability to remotely grenade any building or fortification you want short of a dedicated bomb shelter/bunker. (though if you wanted to target rooms below the top floor it'd take some estimations. That, or fancy smart projectiles that can detect how many ceilings they've gone through which would be much more expensive, but possible. If you wanted to go that route it might be better to have smart-caps that can go on the end of munitions, so they're only smart when you need them to be, otherwise they'll go off in the first room they hit)
It wouldn't be a main assault weapon or anything, but tactically speaking it could be on-call precision air-support.
I'd say that it would even be fairly cheap, but, no, it wouldn't. Nothing the military does is "cheap". You can ask for a single one-use drone that never even has to be recharged because it's entire purpose is to detonate after one flight, and it'll cost as much as your car.
One important thing to know about Project Thor is that you can't actually drop the rods - the satellite is already in freefall towards Earth (and missing because it's falling while flying sideways extremely fast), so if you let go of the rod it will just stay in orbit with the launcher. You have to shoot the rod backwards - negating much of its sideways momentum - to put it on a collision course with Earth.
And yes, it's an impractical weapon. You're launching your projectiles into orbit and then waiting until they're in the right place to deorbit them to hit your target, when you could just build a smaller launch vehicle that flies those rods directly to the target: in other words, a ballistic missile.
Exactly this. It's a kinetic ICBM with extra steps.
@@Erkle64 a lot of extra steps
@@gabrieltanner670 but, and hear me out we have super computers that can calculate the orbit of things so if we know the sat is about to be taken out you could do times launches so they will deorbit into a target long after the sat has been disabled
@@David-jt9nt I'm not saying that you COULDN'T do that... but just that if you COULD see into the future there might just be simpler ways to win a war.
Counter intuitively you have to slow the rod down significantly to de-orbit it. And that assumes the satellite is in the right orbital plane and vaguely right position in it's orbit to hit your intended target whenever you decide to... ICBM's are easier, cheaper, less complicated more flexible and more reliable.
My physics teacher in high school actually worked on this project, in the 80s. along with building a rail gun in his backyard for the government. They never went along with building it, but the documents for the project do exist.
"never went along with building it" hm🤔 😜
Same. My friend's dad worked on the base we grew up on (China Lake Naval Weapons Station) in the Mojave desert. His dad built a prototype of a mini handheld rocket launcher the size of a pistol. Not the 320 which launches grenades, but a freaking rocket launcher. There are so many protoypes, diagrams and sketches of so much cool and destrutive stuff. I served many years in the Army and saw several things in our arms rooms and other locked areas that we dont even delpoy with. Yet we still have it.
just for clarification, if this was ever built, they could easily add a thin layer of iron/steel to the rods, and utilize the concept of a rail gun
though, at that point, it may very well begin to push the limits of the definition of a WMD, since you could easily accelerate the rod to mach omg before it ever enters the atmosphere (though it would be interesting to use this as high powered mining equipment as well)
Because of the way orbital mechanics works, you have to accelerate the rod; in the other direction. LEO orbital speed is mach 25 and up, so you need to slow it down in order to drop it.
Now you're talking about a Mass Driver. The last-resort weapon used in many Sci-Fi stories and shows.
that, wouldn't push the limits of WMD, kinetic bombardment was explicitly not on there. Just because the ATF can do it doesn't mean it's right, we cant just change the definitions of things because we want to when they're clearly written down in plain english.
Eitherway, some launch system would be necessary (if you drop something while in orbit it kinda just... stays in orbit... because that's the point) but the faster you try to launch it from the station you have to remember that the station is going to be pushed back by just as much. Given that, it'd probably not be worth it cost-wise to bother since you'd need to repeatedly ship fuel up to the station so that it can push itself back into a stable orbit. Also, to power something like that you need a massive capacitor bank and a small nuclear reactor to charge them, it dramatically slows down repeated firings, etc.
Even as someone who fuckin loves railguns and has had this exact thought before, it's really not that practical. You would probably want *_some_* magnetic launch system just to get the ball rolling, but not a full fledged railgun.
@@robonator2945 well, the idea was that, if they were pushed to a high enough speed, that on impact you could potentially have a crater the size of a city, much like an atomic bomb leaves behind, which would then warrant a look into what should/shouldn't be classified as a WMD. Yeah, WMDs are pretty destructive, but there comes a point where there's a lower threshold that you cross, and imo, *anything* that crosses that threshold becomes a WMD, even if it's something simple. I'm not trying to redefine what one is, but simply point out that if you get something powerful enough, that it could warrant that on it's own.
@@RyuuTenno
1 : that's literally the exact sort of justification organizations like the ATF use, and it's just as incredibly flawed no matter who is using it. The results of using a tool are entirely dependent on context. A reset based trigger can make someone fire quickly, but someone with a good trigger finger can still fire a completely semi-automatic rifle faster.
2 : I hereby declare bats an officially recognized WMD. One of the most deadly bombings of all time (potentially the *_most_* deadly bombing) was the incendiary bombing of Operation Meetinghouse. The bat bomb however was approximately 10-12x more effective than traditional incendiary bombs. Ergo, strapping small incendiary grenades to bats is a weapon of mass destruction, so either incendiary grenades or bats themselves are WMDs, OR the quantity of fire itself changes the classification, which is just a hilariously stupid metric that can be extended arbitrarily to make literally anything a WMD.
This is the logic you get when you try to backsolve reasoning for a pre-determined conclusion.
Military history, physics, weapon design, cost analysis, and snarky humor... very well done sir indeed. A definite tip of the Hat starting off our Sunday with a yeet and a boom. If you wonder why you're subscribership is going up, stuff like this is exactly why. If you were an actual teacher your method of getting the point across and yet keep your students focused and entertained would have your classes packed.. teachers across the country need to watch this, the man has cracked the code of how to keep your students engaged enough to actually pay attention and learn something. Can't wait for your next example of non-metric Madness that leaves you thinking and a smile on your face.
Military humor? Check.
Cutting witful dialogue? Check!
Comedic editing? Double Check.
Love your work!! Keep it up, brother!
This concept was part of the STARWARS program in the 80s.
Difference between the damage from Thor shot vs a MOAB is that the Thor has much more direct penetration.
tbh because of that it would likely only be used to fuck up bunkers and shit
I always find it so odd that so many people are convinced that we spent billions in 1980's money and accomplished zero of the goals! I might have seen something at White Sands that makes me laugh.
@@VeteranExpat Bro, the things I've heard from some very senior retired SpecOps NCOs... The ones that started out in the TLC campaign during Viet Nam and spearhead every covert everything from then until the 90s... And, then contracted and "advised" until they finally dropped dead... A few are still around.
I love the idea of how ridiculous this weapon idea is, and knowing the US and how they can bend budgets harder than the national debt. This could be a future possibility with cheaper rates of transporting things into space.
And like the saying goes. "It's not a warcrime till you get caught doing it."
so long as everyone else thinks it's ridiculous, no one will be ready for it because the real motto of the U.S. is "Eh, we can go bigger."
Compared to stuff that actually was really used or was thought up in WW2 but never actually tried for various reasons, this is actually fairly tame and mathematically viable. It's just the price tag that's holding it back right now.
Its a war crime if you lose.
I met with the co-inventor of the concept, the late Engineer and Science Fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, and he estimated the practical impact like a 500 pound "dumb bomb". He too said it was never going to be feasible until earth to orbit costs went way down.
I met Jerry at an LTUE convention many moons ago. He said a lot of things were practical once the cost to orbit came down enough. A permanent moon colony was one of them. It was important that he used the word colony & not base.
another thing to remember is that if your mission is simply "take heavy rod into space" you can trim away a lot more fat.
If NASA wanted to, I think a reusable autonomous shuttle that could take one rod at a time and ferry it into space near-enough to a space station for them to get everything loaded and send it back down would be entirely on the table. If you're looking at a fixed, re-used thing like that, then you could even start looking into some really outlandish ideas like a railgun assisted launch or something. I mean, fuck G-forces, nothing is on this thing except microchips and a girthy tungston rod, if we can get a mach 5 headstart that's a *_fuck ton_* less fuel we need to burn. (basically, take an airship carriers launch assist system, now rotate it 90 degrees)
The "let it go" was perfectly placed.
I play a game called Space Engineers, kinetic bombardment from space is hands down one of the most effective ways for dealing with anything too big, slow or crunchy both in space and on the ground
Refinery tipped Missiles......
Yep, just a box of gravel. unbelievable damage.
I too play the game. As TFE put it, the next WMD is "Heavy Shit". I developed an orbital system that guides basically a few blocks of heavy armor capped with blast armor and a warhead for effect. Haven't been able to develop anything better than dropping a rock from space on enemies.
@@locksmithlocksmith5903 lol, gravity generator, battery and tip it with reinforced steel blocks.
Yeet and skeet as it just goes right through anything at max speed
@@dramspringfeald It has been a bit sense I last played but I made and "sold" guided missiles and unguided missiles blueprints on a larger server, and before I stopped playing I made 4 new variants 3 were for moving targets or targets far away (guilded) but that 4th, it had 2 layers of heavy armor for the nose cone protecting a reactor, and a grave generator that was modded (server-side mod) to let the generator work up to 2gs it was amazing bc it always hit at server speed limit (200) and would rip apart their crap and if the target was on a planet just before the missile would hit gervatity would invert and make them go on the roof (another old mod). this was part of the reason I was the weapons king of that server
This was actually based on a older more useful skunk works concept using the A12 interceptor to drop a heavier projectile from 80,000' at mach 3.2+. Needless to say it would be traveling considerably faster at impact. In theory a rocket booster engine & ablative heat shield could also be added to push the rod mach10+. As the formula for kinetic energy is half mass x velocity squared the energy involved is rather substantial.
Give me an Orbital Railgun!
@@edwardteague3276 I would greatly prefer being shot at by the orbital rail gun. The gun gets one shot at a battlefield every 90 minutes with a small shell(likely 152mm). Shell would be limited to under mach 12 to survive re-entry & shot in a predictable 3m window. Also station is going to eat multiple ICBM based kill vehicles within minutes of conflict start. While a Wing of A-12 is going grandslam 2.0 slamming telephone pole size rods into targets with the secondary effects being earthquakes(assuming booster motor & heat shield).
The concept PREdated the A12 (which was a recon plane, you're confusing it with it's brother the YF12 interceptor).
@@alt5494 Why do you ASSUME a rail gun has to be that slow?
Why do you assume that the station won't have anti-ICBM defenses?
@@bricefleckenstein9666 The YF-12 was developed from the A-12. The extra cockpit & radar reduced internal fuel considerably was also unnecessary weight. A kinetic weapon program would have used the A-12.
This assault on the metric system at every opportunity, be it the Unsubscribe podcast or these highly informative videos, is the best.
I also have binged all these videos over the last year. 10/10 highly recommend. Easily better than the history channel.
Even as a Brit I love the creative American approach to the slander, part of the reason why I stick around for this guy is just to hear his metric jokes lol
The History Channel should pay TFE to do videos for them.
After all we are talking about the channel that brings us Forged in Fire.
True.
history channel? they're now either "alien channel" or "tinfoil hat channel"... nick talks more sense about history than those idiots from the "history channel" 😂😂😂
No tenths, 12/12
These new videos are so much higher quality than your old ones, I love it 👍Keep up the good work man
thank you I'm tryin to improve
@@the_fat_electrician It shows, man. The audio is much better quality, and the video editing software isn't clipping parts of your face off with the green screen anymore.
@@the_fat_electrician I don't know if anyone has commented this previously but you should check out the proposed Orion battleship. It's in a similar vein to the Rods from God. I won't spoil everything but basically space battleship with 5 inch guns, nuclear mortars, deployable marines and propelled by dropping nukes out the back and blowing them up. In the 60's.
Kennedy said no.
I'm reminded of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where Luna won pretty much because they were on top of a giant gravity well above the earth, and just kept rolling rocks onto them, which incidentally is a huge stupid worry of mine, because whoever gets a permanent moon colony up and running first basically rules earth, because there is no real way to fight back against giant rock attacks
It's also used as a threat in the Starks War series as a threat
Technically, they used rock-filled metal canisters and a linear accelerator to send them.
They needed the cans for the magnetic launcher to be able to "grab" them TO send them.
“Zero is could as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck…. #science…”
Absolutely love it!
Not sure if you’ve heard this before, but you’re like a real life family guy episode. I love it. Keep it up.
I'd love to see what the Quackbang's opinion would be of an even crazier idea. That being Project Orion, which was just a thinly veiled cover for its intended military application, Casaba-Howitzer. We're talking a nuclear pipe bomb.. an actual nuclear weapon shaped charge. For when just a regular nuke won't make the other guy quite dead enough.
I mean, it was kinda just a thought experiment. But you could use it as a nuclear shaped charged device, yes, but that's because sufficiently powerful propulsion systems are indistinguishable from weapons in their own right(even if they are actually using weapons for the propulsion)
@@novatopaz9880 I think Jerry Pournelle's Kzinti series made that point about there being little difference between tools and weapons.
@@brodriguez11000 makes sense, if you build a laser that can propel a ship to Jupiter. than if you point it at something not designed to collect laser energy. that something will likely have a bad day.
@@novatopaz9880 Project Orion was real - but never got past the "use conventional explosives for proof of concept" phase due to one of the early Nuclear Test treaties.
The velocity would depend on distance traveled.
If it were a guided projectile they could send it around the planet once to build energy then guide it to target.
Or drop it from a satellite in a much higher orbit and use guidance from there.
Both options would SIGNIFICANTLY increase its kinetic energy released on impact.
they originally thought they could get it up to mach 10. but once it hits the earth's atmosphere it slows down do to drag
@@the_fat_electrician oh yeah for sure it would slow down but atmosphere can only do so much, depending on the speed.
I'm not suggesting it's real or anything, I agree with you.
But the American unhealthcare system can definitely figure out how to make this more lethal.
You don't even need an actual guidance system on the Rod itself, only the satellite. Math equations will help you hit whatever you want from orbit
@@comradeeverclear4063 if you drop it straight down from low orbit but I think sending it around the earth once or from a high orbit to pick up speed might require some to keep it on correct reentry path. I'm not talking rocket motors, just like little attitude thrusters.
If it's going too fast it will also start breaking up in atmosphere too.
i love this "theory" so much, the design, everything about it i love. I reference it every chance i get, had a whole d&d character whose' whole mission into life was to make it.
Great video. Though point of clarification, I think you mean billion instead of trillion (240 million x 4 = 960 million). Also, the falcon heavy rocket has a payload of 55,000 lbs and costs 90 million to launch, so we could launch 2 of these bad boys into space for 90 million today. Though I agree, it probably doesn't exist (yet), the expensive part would definitely be the satellite that launches them, not the rods themselves.
nice catch. but remember when the F-117 didn't exist.....
You can't send the rods up in one peace. So you have to build a satellite that can melt tungsten bb's and the material for the mold. It's hard enough to even try that on earth with a factory of a 1000 men. Now try that in space with 10 men and an army of robots. Making it is the hard part that costs the most.
@@RyanWilliams-sq8fg Or just make them so they can screw together.
@@benlawton5420 On impact with the ground you would want it to be one solid piece. You would shatter more bedrock that way. Sky scrapers are best built on bed rock, so launching that onto a city makes it not worth it to build back up again. Nukes don't really damage bedrock that much.
The expensive part is the energy necessary to make them come back down in a specific location. Orbital dynamics are not easy.
"USSF orbital this is K6B07. Fire mission, over."
"K6B07, pebbles or sand?"
"Sand would be lovely."
"K6B07, K-strike DOB in progress. Wherever you are, it's probably danger close."
What I have heard about this project was in the 1970s a DoD spokesman let it slip during a news briefing that we had these in orbit at that time. I can't remember the exact year or the name of the spokesman because it has been about 5 years since I heard about it. I think it was post Vietnam around 1976-1978 during the lead up to Star Wars being announced officially in the early 1980s. So this project could have been done in the massive black defense budgets of the late Cold War and no one would have questioned it.
Link
'' in the 1970s a DoD spokesman let it slip during a news briefing that we had these in orbit at that time. I can't remember the exact year or the name of the spokesman because it has been about 5 years since I heard about it. I think it was post Vietnam around 1976-1978'' You really messed up your time table. So in the 1970s you heard a spokesman talk about it being in orbit at that time but you cant remember the name of the spokesman or the 'year'(What the f does that mean? Are you trying to say the age of the spokesman or the year it happened) and the reason why you cant remember anything is because it was 5 years ago and the the project was done in 1976-1978 which is after they announced that they had the rods in orbit in 1970. Bro what the fuck seems like youre either lying or just sloppy as hell
@@eeurr1306 Hey motard, I heard about it 5 years ago. These were mentioned in a press conference at the Pentagon in the mid to late 1970s (so about 40 years before you were born). Next time pay attention to detail and actually read what is written before showing how dumb you are.
Anyways the project is infunctional anyways
Could have? Sure. But as a PsyOp spook, "let it slip" sounds VERY much like a disinformation campaign to scare enemies into inaction. TFE said it correctly - way too expensive considering the alternatives, especially for the 1970s-80s. For the cost of $250 Billion *per rod,* not considering maintenance _in space,_ and _in today's dollars_ they could've built a fleet of tanks, nuke subs, and aircraft carriers and Congress critters would've fought tooth and nail for the manufacturing bids to be in their district.
Man, I think I went through all your longer videos and now all that's left is these shorter 5-15 min videos. I need more!!!!
So other than the Telephone pole there was another proposal I saw for "Space Needles" which were about 5 feet long and a few inches wide. The idea behind them was to use the excellent penetration of a rod from space to take out missile silos and bunkers in a first strike with basically no time to react.
I feel like this approach would be much more likely, a smaller rod made out of tungsten of depleted uranium with a rocket and guidance dropped from space. Likely to be used against hardened targets. I'm guessing a 5 foot rod of depleted uranium falling at mach 10 goes through a seriously scary amount of material.
@@nitrodasnipaz9392 The estimate as I recall was something 100 to 200 feet of rock (depending on size) and the bunker underneath. Though this may have been to the largest rods. But yeah a mach 10 impact is kinda scary.
@@noctisumbra2749 Just some gravity with a little rocket assistance, I'd be curious to know which would be more effective, DU or tungsten
@@nitrodasnipaz9392 honestly probably about the same given the near identical densities of the alloys likely to be used. But I don't know for certain
@@noctisumbra2749 But I know DU "self sharpens" depending on what it's going through so maybe that'd help or hurt it's performance
I though it would hit much faster than Mach 5, considering orbital velocity to maintain a low earth orbit is between Mach 22 and Mach 29 (17,500mph-22,500mph) depending on the orbit and mass of the spacecraft.
Exactly.
Air resistance might slow it down. The moment it hits atmosphere, it will begin to decelerate.
@in desperate need of a scotch You're forgetting that when you throw something out of a speeding car, that object starts with the same velocity as the car.
P.S. Just "letting go" won't do anything at all - the rod would be going the same speed as it's launcher and would just sit there next to it, I'd recommend firing in a retrograde direction so the resulting movement winds up being "downward"
@in desperate need of a scotch iron and concrete would not survive reentry at orbital velocities. Iron melts at lower temps than it would experience during reentry. As it started to melt it would throw off the aerodynamics causing the rod to begin tumbling and the it would be torn apart by aerodynamic and gravitational forces. Think of a meteorite entering the atmosphere, most are torn apart during decent and the only ones to make ground impact are those that are sufficiently large to have enough matter to have something left at impact. Nuclear warhead re-entry vehicles use U238 uranium (depleted uranium) because it would resist reentry temperatures almost as wells as tungsten but acts as a neutron reflector resulting in more energetic reactions once the warhead detonates.
@in desperate need of a scotch Tungsten works GREAT in a rail gun - it's got high resistance which is what generates the motive force, and a high heat tolerance, so the current doesn't melt the projectiles.
Or were you thinking space coil gun / gauss gun?
Rail guns use the current, coil guns use rapidly switched magnetic fields. Rail guns are easy to build & design, with high maintenance. Coil guns are .... well let's just say I said "fuck this" after doing 4 pages of math and winding 1/4 mile of wire to make the 1st 2 electromagnets.
there would be a way to increase the RFG's damage... take a cue from "the thing". have a casing that releases thousands of little flechettes. the casing could be made out of a heavy material that once hot enough would expand and break open. doing this would make the smaller rods fall out and expand it's impact zone.
while not as big a boom this would expand it's area of effect and this could even be a different type of ammo in the same gun. a shotgun round if you will. with the regular RFG being more of a sniper round.
I remember reading about these in Science Fiction in the 90’s the author named them “Thor Shots.” I would also like to say this concept is considered a WMD in the Babylon 5 universe, the only difference is the opposition takes asteroids in the local solar system and drops them on the planet (that is an extinction level WMD.)
Yeah, when the Centauri bombed the Narn homeworld with asteroids.
That was a mass driver, if I'm getting it right this is more like dropping something off the roof to hit something on the sidewalk.
@@ninjabearpress2574 kind of, except you are shooting 100 ton and up rocks from outside far orbit in a continuous bombardment, and if your enemies want to take shots at your icecaps. There is very little defense against that other that don’t let them in system, or pray for outside help break the siege.
As I recall, those were in the half mile or so diameter range. Not a lamp post. Slight difference in mass.
@@zedhiro6131 With a lot of the rocks blowing from friction before they reach the ground, like the one that wiped out that forest in Siberia --- hell I was amazed there were any Narn left.
"How do I know it's not real, MATH that's how"
Every marine in 1000 miles: HSSSSS!!
As someone who appreciates someone actually doing the math and logistics to place this, thank you. The fact is, it might be easier shooting from the Moon. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein. This method is used. They fire off rounds from the Moon's Cargo transport system. Great read.
Actually, they used the system and it's metal cans and filled the cans with moon rock for mass.
"Moon" happens to be my favorite novel by one of my favorite authors.
I actually did the math on this a while back. To get kilotons out of a kinetic strike took quite a few zeroes.
The end result was one of those rods at roughly Mach 500. Or ~380,000 mph. And that doesn't beat Fat Man by a hell of a lot.
To be roughly in line with Castle Bravo, that same rod would need to be going at least 20 times faster. (Put another way, that's ~1.14% of the speed of *light!)*
The other option is simply to increase the mass. A rocket like the Saturn V could put up a ~120 tonne rod, which gives you about a kiloton at orbital velocity.
In the near future, Starship ought to be able to do around 250 tonnes in expendable configuration, so around 2 kilotons.
Though realistically, using it's reusable configuration to put a bunch of 1-kiloton rods up is probably a lot more cost effective.
I always liked the theory behind the rods from God; even small mountains would get the heebie-jeebies at the thought of a tungsten telephone pole hitting whatever supervillian lair is contained within the belly of that mountain.
Also, your math was slightly off; the report stated the reduction from drag would be around 5 kilometers per second, putting it as three, from around eight. 3km/s is still around Mach 10, which puts the energy at the tip of the telephone pole at around 4.8 - 5 (ish) x 10^10 Joules, which still only puts it at *around* 11.71 tonnes of TNT.
As the guy who thought up Thor was simply considering it as a hard target deleter, as opposed to a civilization deleter, in that respect the project is super scary... Though realistically tungsten is so absurdly expensive that even the US would think it's a bit much for a single bunker... though I do wonder if they could be salvaged after use.
Do you really need solid tungsten though? I imagine cheap quality graphene for most of it would be both comedically heat resistant and heavy enough. (it's not like you can't make the rod longer as needed here.)
I did the math myself and reached about 6.5 tons of TNT for a cost of about 180k per rod. This was assuming that it'd land at whatever it's terminal velocity was and calculating a terminal velocity of mach 7.5 using an idealized teardrop shape. (note : I don't know how to calculate the projected area of a teardrop, so I assumed 50% larger than the given diameter of a 1 foot wide cylinder, or about half a meter) Assuming that they could get the cost per pound down to 1000usd (which is slightly cheaper than what we can pull off today currently, but they'd be able to highly-specialize in ways we just can't for general purpose spaceflight) the total cost per rod (in terms of getting it to space, not raw materials) would be about 180000usd.
In short, assuming my math is right (which is 10x more expensive than they thought and only half as powerful as the calculations you have here) the dollars-to-detonations effectiveness comparing it to little-boy (assuming 50million per little boy which is 10% of the average cost per bomb for the entire project, but the project had to develop the bombs too) is 0.3 to 32.5, making rods from god 108 times more cost-effective in a dollars-to-detonations comparison.
For reference, that means that the US government could drop a little-boy-equivalent on twenty five different cities, for the cost of ONE M1 abrams.
Small correction the energy of the rod is not just the acceleration from droping but the angular velocity of its orbit closer to mach 22 then mach 5
exactly
I was about to write this. The min Orbital velocity is about Mach 25 (lowest altitude for lowest de-orbit energy required). If you did something clever like having it stored past geo-stationary (ie out of range of most counter satellite systems this could potentially get this up past Mach 32 (reentry speed of Apollo 11) on reentry. Now there is crazy of storing it out of Earths well and maybe get to Mach 35 (Hayabusa reentry speed). The point is though everyone loves a good reentry :). (my numbers might be a little out but as OP says its a lot more than Mach 5)
You are all forgetting atmospheric drag. It won't be going Mach 25 by the time it hit the surface.
@@jsquared1013 yes. But it won't have slowed down to mere terminal velocity, either.
@@jsquared1013 at mach 35 it would be going so fast that the atmosphere can barely offer any real protection. Realistically, maybe a 1km/s deceleration before impact. Anything higher than 20km basically doesnt have atmosphere and it would take less than 2 seconds to go through it.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest SOB in space
Seriously these videos are like a breath of fresh air when going through crazy bs in life 🤙🏻
I enjoyed the content and quality, well done. I would like to point out that this idea was also mentioned in the book - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - by Robert A. Heinlein - where they threw rocks from the moon to the earth - I guess this does not affect the race to establish a lunar colony
The other benefit of the “rods from god” concept was is penetrating ability. In the event of a nuclear war most command and control facilities would be moved to bunkers with active defense systems. As you said nothing currently is capable of intercepting it and at that speed and density it’ll punch right through whatever fortifications they have. So to answer your question I don’t think the US would pay that much for four bullets. I think they’d pay that much to have the ability to make a direct strike on an enemy C2 infrastructure destroying it within minutes.
Yeah killing ur enemies command structure gives a HUGE advantage, not just tactically. Since if you do kill their leaders in one go it could lead to civil war and will allow you to setup a puppet using one of the factions from said civil war.
Question is, how likely would these things be banned by Geneva, and if so, how likely would America spend trillions of dollars on a weapon that would likely be banned after the first use?
Perhaps, but it wouldn't be an on-demand weapon, which reduces its value. You could always build _more_ to open up 'windows of opportunity,' but now you are multiplying the original "absurd price" even further. Additionally, you risk alerting your adversary of a new capability, further reducing its value.
At the end of the day, we stick with what we know. If we need a 'Rod from God,' we've got plenty of old satellites to "de-orbit."
Funny enough, I got to this channel from the G.I. Joe movie 🤣
Love the channel bro, it got you a sub and a like. Look forward to more.
welcome!!
New shirt: “Types of WMD’S: Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, Heavy Sh*t.”
First time seeing the channel and I'm thinking, "The Fat Electrician, is there any other type"? Nice content and format, keep up the good work
I've known some thin once - starting with a first cousin.
Love your work. Keep them coming.
As I agree with your mathematical computation of the energy I'd like to add one thought. As the rod from God re-enters the atmosphere it's going to pick up a lot of temperature. And as one who worked over 40 years in the steel industry anytime a super hot near molten material comes in contact with even moist earth let alone water the instantaneous production of steam creates an impressive explosion on its own in addition to the kinetic energy released on impact. As this would not raise it to the level of a nuclear warhead, it I think would raise it well above the Moab. And as for it being not cost-effective right now I'm sure conventional wisdom would have said the same thing about the Manhattan project.
Orbital Kayaking is STILL the most extreme sport. Get dropped from Orbit in a kayak with a heat shield, wearing a space suit, and have to reenter the atmosphere and then paraglide into a river to paddle down it.
At a previous job I had do to some research on R.K.K.V.s (Relativistic Kinetic Kill Vehicles) and the math and studies on those things are insane.
The rods from god showed up in my research and really the biggest thing stopping them from being WMD is just velocity. If the can impart a massive amount of velocity on them it gets out of control super quick.
The fact that the Idea of it exists and is possible to make regardless of the price is why I believe it’s real.
Okay... just found this channel for the first time. Love it. First of all, I love an obnoxious and mouthy dude that isn't a meathead but actually knows something. In this case, that's maths. Secondly, it's raw. Josh Hollings is a very smart man, but he's terribly polite and professional. Thirdly, it's cynical. I like cynicism. Thank you for this.
I disagree, Uncle Sam would definitely spend a couple trillion for 4 bullets. However, I don't think we are capable of doing it . . . yet.
Come on SpaceX, make it work !
It'd be more viable if we mined the resources in space and built the rods up there. The price would drop really quick after that as each round is just a telephone pole sized chunk of metal. Getting a satellite up there to hold, aim, and release it wouldn't be that hard really. We lack the funds to develop such infrastructure though as we'd rather spend all of our money on dumb ish instead.
It may not be a thing (yet) but the simple fact that they have the precise calculation on why they can't for now def makes me think they thought on doing it
Oh it's definitely been a thing sitting in the Pentagon's _"Might be nice to have"_ filing cabinet. It was part of the Star Wars initiative Reagan failed to launch. As that cost comes down I guarantee that some generals will look at it again if for no other reason than to add to their own specialty's budget.
Of course they've thought about it; it's just impractical. Far easier (and cheaper) to "improperly" deorbit an obsolete satellite if it comes down to it.
“0 is cold as fuck and 100 is hot as fuck” but celsius 0 defines the freezing point so thats why its superior, and then everything below 0 is literally freezing
Tungsten =super expensive. With what tungsten shotgun shells cost, a rod of this size would be extremely expensive.
Russians acrtually made a bomb called the FOAB. (father of all bombs) which was actually stronger than the MOAB
if that's true it's hilarious
Iirc, and I could be wrong, but I think its called the "Czar Bomba" or something like that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_All_Bombs
@@nerocaesar9249 I think you're correct but the first comment is wrong unless Russia changed the name to FOAB because I believe the original name was the soviet unions doing before they fell.
@@nerocaesar9249 Tsar Bomba was the USSR's largest _nuclear_ bomb. As for them making a FOAB, I could see it but I doubt it would do anything but go dud what with the corruption and degredation of their maintenance skills.
“Rods from God” is something we talked about extensively in physics classes like classical mechanics and modern physics. It was meant to be a physicalization of the kinetic energy equation (KE = 0.5 * m * v^2) to show how much velocity matters when it comes to kinetic energy. This is super important when doing any sort of math for stuff going fast… which is most stuff in space.
Coincidentally, we also learned how to make a nuke, enrich uranium, how explosives work, and how to make basic explosives. Then chemistry taught us how to make chemical weapons while biology taught us how those chemical weapons affect people as well as how you could theoretically make biological weapons using CRISPR as well as a bunch of random historical examples of biological warfare. Now that I think about it, despite that talk about the “responsibility of us as scientists and physicists” and peace and blah blah blah, they really just wanted us to make weapons. Coincidentally, Boeing, a nuclear storage site, a nuclear weapons site, and a bunch of military industrial stuff is really close by. I wonder if that’s related… naaaah
My only problem with it is the belief that it would turn that kinetic energy into an area effect explosion. My suspicion is that it would direct all of that energy down, meaning that it would just put a hole in the continental plate, possibly making a new volcano. Course that would be pretty cool too!
I remember reading somewhere that there were two other issues that prevented this from happening aside the cost:
1) Because the satellite would be orbiting earth, you would only be able to strike wherever its orbit was and only during certain time intervals. That meant that you really had to get a full network of rod satellites to make this work.
2) It was imposible to properly aim the rod with the precision required. I think they even tried to put trusters on the back of the rod but it was still too hard to steer, so it was just too inaccurate.
1) Correct, it's not an ideal 'on-demand' weapon. Also, not great against an unpredictable moving target.
2) Accuracy would come down to the equipment used and the calculations themselves; it's entirely possible. Thrusters would make the weapon incredibly accurate, but violate the treaties of concern, negating its use.
Important to note you do need propulsion on the rods. Because the sattelite is in orbit the rods need a force imparted on them so that their trajectory becomes sub orbital. The only thing the force of gravity is doing to those rods is keeping them in orbit if you simply "drop them". But yeah you'd have to do a bunch of spicy math for the trajectory and re-entry burn. Rocket science
Nah, you can just push the rods with a mechanical arm.
"Drop" is being used as a layman catch-all.
There are designs which incorporate propulsion, including retro-rockets, but those go against the treaties we've signed (a significant consideration for implementing such a weapon in the first place).
@@redslate I doubt that a mechanical arm can push the rod with enough speed to be practical.
A railgun could.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 Then you fundamentally fail to understand potential versus kinetic energy... and gravity.
A railgun goes against the current conventions/treaties in place.
@@redslate The railgun would be used to DEORBIT the rod.
Why is that hard for YOU to understand?
And the entire concept seems to be a violation of at least one space treaty, NOT just the potential railgun part.
Hasn't stopped the Soviets/Russians or the Chinese from doing "killer sat" testing, though the Soviet tests seem to have been from before the treaty.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 A space-based railgun is, itself, a violation. We have to hold ourselves to the standards in spite of what Russia and China are doing. Why is _THAT_ hard for _YOU_ to understand?
Also, most of the A-Sats you're alluding to use the _exact_ _method_ I defined, an 'innocuous' *mechanical* *arm* .
Not a fan of COD: Ghost though yeah that would be wow.
If SpaceX StarShip actually works as designed... Then this becomes cheaper than Nukes.
Also. The minimum speed to stay in orbit is 17,000 MPH. If instead of just dropping straight down, you redirect the rod, so that it hits your designated target at that speed, minus whatever air resistance bleeds off a giant nail... The damage potential gos up quite a bit.
I mean...yeah, a 20ft tungsten rod would have approximately that force, but that's just this particular design we are speaking of. Very little aside from launch payload prevents you from just....making it bigger.
Edit: I know that doesn't evade the cost per payload issue.
Was also thinking that they really aughta redefine what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction under the whole mass part, and just do the same thing we always do, arbitrarily pick a list of energy totals and make it an and/or modes of operation list...which would admittedly probably reclassify a MOAB also.
Edit 2: it's also worth mentioning that we as a species have designed far far far far more weapons than we have actually built, and just because schematics exist somewhere doesn't mean anyone's actually gotten around to building it.
It seems that all the fun toys are unobtainable cause of the laws of nature, would cost the entire worlds economy, lack of recourses and the Geneva Convention.
As another poster commented, mach 5 is very much on the low side. From the times when I have looked into it, you could also increase the destructive capacity with a small conventional explosive. Still, we're talking lower end tactical nuke rather than the big strategic ones on cold war ICBMs.. Then again, wiping out a large neighborhood to small city in a single shot with less than 15 minutes notice and virtually no countermeasure other than taking out the weapon platform before it is fired is quite the capability.
Given how brittle tungsten is, all you'd really need is a light bursting charge along the length to cause it to fracture apart above the impact point. At Mach 5, the shrapnel will still have crazy velocity, and you can just shotgun a building if you don't need the same penetration.
An explosive would violate treaties. The entire point of this would be that it is simply an inert object.
There's already 4 versions WMDs this would have made it 5 versions of WMDs.
Chemical, Biological, Radiation, Nuclear "CBRN" are the current 4(radiation bombs are also known as Dirty Bombs & nuclear doesn't just mean atomic it can also be Electromagnetic Pulse)
When launch costs drop to that level it still won't make sense to build them on earth and then launch into space. Instead the means of producing them will be shipped into orbit and material from the moon and asteroids will be used to create kinetic weapons.
To add to the video. The tungsten rods wouldn't also disperse there energy like a bomb. It would essentially be a bunker buster. Imbedding its self into the ground. Essentially it would be the deepest penetrating bunker buster. There wouldnt be much of a shock wave to speak off at the surface in comparison to its energy.
you would think something shooting from space would have a similar damage as a meteor but a control blast with no burning and effecting the whole planet.
I mean the 1000mm main guns of the starships I wrote about fire special Space To Ground rounds which have limited guidance in atmosphere and have a massive tungsten core. But they’re still used as the equivalent of firing a 16’ shell from a Battleship. There’s a reason they ALSO carry nukes. Because nukes are big. Like….REALLY big.
Project Thor, it gets mentioned in the novel Footfall.
Along with Project Orion.
you have to remember the rod inst just drop strait down.. satelites travel a 20,000 km/h around earth..
adding velocity in excess of what gravity would impart makes the energy release get stupid big in a real hurry.
The rod from god thing will stay with me for a long time thank you for that one, i will get many chuckles from that.
Normal tooling for tungsten is done by mixing powdered tungsten with a separate binder metal appropriate for the job that it's needed for. Then, a mold and hydrolic press is used to form it into shape, then heated in a kiln to glaze over the binder metal holding togather the tungsten. Similar process for making body armor trama plates. Tooling one of the densest metals known to man is possible requiring very special tools and more than likely are roached during the process. Forging pure tungsten would require a plasma furnace and, more than likely, a very, very large power source, I would quess a nuclear power plant to supply the mass amounts of energy required. So, just the fabrication of the projectiles would more than likely outweigh the cost of sending it to space or the need to looney toon some bad dude in a mud hut in a foreign country.
The only reason why I know this is because dug deep into the process of making tungsten fishing weights and how we can do it so cheep.
So... Engineer here that did defense contracting... It really depends on a lot, but I remember doing basic calculations for some of the proposed kinetic bombardment scenarios and it should be possible to get to megaton levels. You do need a yeet from geostationary distance though. Iirc strapping a rocket motor on to it for aiming and adding a few miles per second of Delta V gets you in the ballpark, gravity accelerates it all of the rest of the way down giving it a freaking stupid velocity. Now at that point a lot of people would argue that the tungsten would melt at these velocities, but it was proposed to use ablative ceramic coatings to mitigate.... So, definitely possible if it comes screaming in at mach 300.
It wouldn't matter, much, if the tungsten liquified, just so long as it didn't vaporize.
@@sailor-rick If it goes through the atmosphere in 2-3 seconds, it's not going to have time to liquify more than the very outermost layer.
Think "Thermal Inertia".
Actually there is a little thing called the Star Wars treaty though it’s fairly generic but there’s a clause for space based weapons. I’ll age myself here but I actually remember that this was a hot top during the Regan Administration and Then USSSR was pretty nervous about things being dropped on them from space.
Fahrenheit is based on human temp being 100 and boiling water and freezing water being 180 degrees apart just turns out that they were off by 1.4 degrees when they devised the system due to better methods of measuring temperature becoming available.
I think the first time I actually heard of the tungsten rods from space was in the Syndicate Wars from '96 with the "Satellite Rain" attack
I’m 73 years old. I obviously grew up with the Atomic age and the weirdnesses that occurred I like your work. Your detail, your attitude and your sass makes me as proud as hell. Oh, yeah…. Electricians RULE!!!
We need to be clear that 10,000 bucks a pound is a very recent development, and mostly due to SpaceX. Before the Falcon 9, it was considerably more expensive.
But "Project Thor" as it was known, was a very real proposal. There was a follow-on proposal for much smaller munitions. Think large "tungsten crowbar" instead of telephone pole. It would have the destructive power of a standard 2000 lb bomb, but again, could be dispatched to the target without risking aircraft.
2025 is right around the corner, get you’re Christmas lists ready for the equivalent of cartoon anvils on cue time
The only thing I have to say is that they could push it out to a higher orbit greater distance more time for gravity to work and higher speeds impact force being mass times velocity. But if you want to make nuclear bombs completely obsolete just redirect a asteroid it worked great against the dinosaurs
One of the best concepts of how technologically advanced we have been or become boils down to how fast or far can we throw a rock? Voyager 1 and 2? Really fast rocks. We develop faster than light travel? The first thing we're gonna do is throw a rock at a planet faster than the speed of light just to see what happens.
I did the quick search, the Mythbusters episode where they blew up a cement truck was 5 tons of TNT, so that's basically how useful the rods from god would be
This is why mining asteroids in space is such a great idea
Easy way to make them more destructive add something like the srb from the space shuttle to the rod…launch it and let it accelerate to impact. Would probably bring the speed up to extremely fun levels
Buh terminal velocity is 120 mph (the speed of gravity). Rods from god are coming in from orbit at orbital velocity. If orbiting at 124 miles above earth orbital velocity is 17000 mph or about 140x the power of a moab. 124 miles is too high you say? Well orbital velocity has to go up the closer you are to the planet so it only gets worse.
Now that we unlocked fusion power, there will be hostage weapons that never run out of power and can detonate at any moment. They either Land on or hover above a target
One of the original concepts for low earth orbit kinetic ballistic platforms was called "Brilliant pebbles". Bowlingball sized balls of (dont recall the materials) . The balls were railgun projectiles with massive kinetic destruction, minus the radiation common in blasts that large.
You also have to shed orbital velocity to drop it so you would need a propellant just to get it out of orbit. Just releasing it won’t make it fall.
Once you know how high the object needs to be to achieve terminal velocity that's as high as you need to go. So yeah, ballistic missiles can already do this, and we don't even need to put it into orbit. While you're at it you might as well put a warhead on it and do some real damage.
"Elsa that shit" is a glorious way to describe a Vegan Nuke.
Your velocity estimate is about 1.5km per second, which is not bad. To make it work it needs to be moving at around 10km or mach 30, est.
My question is why do we keep using rockets instead of something more similar to the SR71 blackbird I mean it already licks the taint of space; this is just an idea but laterally accelerate the payload then once close enough to space backhand that shit harder than Chris Brown ever could
Not gonna lie, US space elsa satellites loaded with tungsten telephone poles sounds like winning to me.
Not going to lie ghosts was underrated and had a great story campaign
Looking for more topics.. try the pig war 1859...US vs England.....San Juan Island
TFE, you have the sharpest wit I've ever heard addressing military topics. I bet the armed forces really appreciate you, man and share your wit with each other!