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Yeah we gotta be careful with that company. A terrible history and they haven't gotten much better, aside from what they were forced to do by the FTC because what they were doing was illegal. Morally though, they haven't improved.
You're not considering that they could simply put a guidance package like the JDAM uses, only made for re-entry. It has fins and a brain to guide it. Acting like it would just be a simple pole dropped is kinda silly. It would have some sort of guidance systems in place.
AKA "Thor's Hammer", a proposal for a space weapon. Basically a steel rod with a tiny aiming brain. Jerry Pournelle, a guy who was an expert in almost everything. Polymath. If you're interested one of his novels with Larry Niven "Footfall" uses the idea.
Controlling the orientation during descent would not be that difficult. Simply contain the majority of the mass at the "front" of the rod, much like an arrow.
A 9-ton tungsten rod hitting Earth at orbital speed (7.8 km/s) would release about 458 GJ of energy, equivalent to 109.5 tons of TNT. Ek = (1/2) * 9000 kg * (7800 m/s)^2 = 458 GJ 458 GJ / (4.184 * 10^9 J/Tonne TNT) = 109.5 Tons TNT - MOAB: ~11 tons TNT - Hiroshima (Little Boy): ~15,000 tons TNT - Modern nuclear bombs: several million tons TNT So, the rod's impact is like 10 MOABs but far less than a nuclear bomb.
While I agree with most of it (and you are being quite generous with the rods by not considering drag), there are some _tactical nukes_ with comparable yields (e.g.: a B61 bomb could yield as little as 0.3 kt). Also, a pretty signifcant chunk of the energy released by a nuke is "wasted" in the form of radiation that escapes the Earth, so I believe it could be a fair comparison with a small yield tactical nuke.
The trouble with this is that you first have to hoist these heavy RFG's up into orbit and load them into a launch platform. Also, they are very inaccurate. This concept was looked into by the military several decades ago ad rejected as impractical
I think you're overthinking things, my dude. Most of these issues have already been solved, especially the targeting. MIRV nuclear warheads are neither powered, nor steered to their targets. They're merely aimed upon release from the MIRV vehicle, and follow a simple ballistic trajectory - with a quick spin initiated by a motor for anti-tumble stability. Similar to barrel rifling, but without the barrel. There's no directional control, nor thrust emanating from them, and they fall like a bolt of lightning till they go boom. Lots of youtube vids showing the speeds at which they enter (video from weapons tests). They're traveling so fast, it looks like a lightning strike. The only issue would be getting a crapload of tungsten weight up there to begin with.
..and keeping it up there.. Everything in low earth orbit needs a boost now and then to keep from crashing into earth.. Nukes, Satellites etc can all burn up 'harmlessly' when we get tired of them.. but this thing would be a nightmare to maintain, de-orbit... and if you forget to fill the gas tank, worst case scenario is you accidentally take out 'France'..
_Worst idea?_ Hardly... Imagine the damage a single impactor could do to a single city. Now spread them around the planet. *Rods From The Gods* would be easily implemented by a few dozen *StarShips* floating in _Synchronous Orbit_ just sitting there, looming, but not violating any *Nuclear Treaties.* They could be released, guided by simple chemical rockets to any GPS coordinate on the planet, and make one hell of a splash or splat when they hit the ground.
I appreciate that this video tackles some of the obvious problems with this concept that are rarely addressed. However I would like to bring to your attention that in order for the rod's hypothetical orbital trajectory to intercept the earth's surface you don't HAVE to lower your orbital velocity. If Kerbal Space Program has taught me right, you can burn Radially or anti-Radially (towards the Nadir or the Zenith, aka toward or away from the planet's center) to adjust the eccentricity of your orbit whilst maintaining orbital velocity. As for aiming, if Mechjeb can do it then I think the Space Force could manage..
you wouldn't have to make a massive platform in space to launch these god rods, you'd just need a to use equal thrust in the opposite direction against the launch thrust for the rod from god. Like a PRIG launcher or recoilless rifle.
Control fins and a booster with thrust vectoring would solve most of the issues you cited. I think you took “dropping a rod” too literal. They wouldn’t literally drop a tungsten rod. It would have control surfaces and likely a booster engine to launch and direct the rod.
It’s all fun and games until you have to deorbit the platform at the end of its service life. On a different note, having a simple solid rocket booster and a basic guidance package is normal for modern missiles. Worst comes to worst, the guidance fins, computers, and solid rocket motor are just regularly swapped out from the top of a metal rod. It’s far cheaper than replacing the entire unit, and it’s probably cheaper still than having a nuclear silo program. Similarly, you don’t need to drop it directly down, just cause it to have a suborbital trajectory like any classical ballistic missile and boom. Weapon. If you watch a video of ballistic missile reentry test vehicles (for nuclear missile tests) they come to impact site at like a 35degree angle above the horizon.
This is also why there is no such thing as time travel. Every thing the universe is moving at tremendous speeds. There is no way to calculate every variable.
First, Rods from God has nothing to do with atomic weapons. The equation you are looking for is (KE = 0.5 × m × v²) not (E=MC^2). Also, it's been over thirty years since I read Dr. Pournelle's paper but I seem to remember he mentioned the words small rocket motor and guidance system in relation to the rods. A small solid rocket motor and control fins would make this an effective and devastating weapon. Solid rocket motors do not need pumps and fuel tanks BTW. Dr. Pournelle was an avid space enthusiast and I assure you he had a good grasp of orbital mechanics. He was well aware of the problems involved and knew it was a bit more complicated than "dropping a rod from orbit". If you want to be taken seriously I would advise you to actually read the related source materials, not just the leftist peacenik talking points. I would like to add that I am deeply disappointed in you. Throwing shade on a good man who is no longer here to defend himself. Shame on you. Thumbs down, get your facts straight before you post.
What goes up, must come down. If the launcher was to malfunction and lose orbit, those things are coming down somewhere and there is nothing we could to do control where it lands. While we can blow up sataelights that have this issue, nothing short of a nuke is going to affect a 8 ton tungsten rod.
@10:20 I'm sorry but you _ass-u-me_ that any rod would be released without some form of rocket-propelled _guidance system._ @10:50 The fall would not be from 200 miles, but from 35,786 km (22,236 miles.)
Complaining about things is a Rant. So pointing out the dangers of anything is "over the top" - Rant is getting to be a popular way of belittling an opinion. Maybe we should be grateful to your friend. This Rods from God idea has been around for a good while now. Its son of Rail Gun and that other Regan stuff.
Yeah our phones/computers have been spying on us for a while now.. we were bustin the balls of some 20yr old kid at our work like 5yrs ago for not knowing who iron maiden was.. 20mins later he comes up with his phone, he went to buy a t-shirt from the site he always used and it was nothing but iron maiden shirts on the front page.. its just gonna get crazier with this AI stuff .. Oh and 'Rods from the Gods' are dumb.. everything in orbit needs a boost every now and then to keep from crashing back to earth.. satellites are 'small'/less dense, enough to mostly burn up in the atmosphere and 'safely' crash in the ocean when they run out of juice/are no longer needed.. nukes can be 'turned off' or destroyed easily.. The Rods WILL have to come down someday whether used or not, but its gonna make a big boom(s) or tidal wave(s) when it does.. and its gonna cost a lot of money to maintain/fuel in that time.. and a micro meteorite (or disgruntled country) could take out an important component at any time and now we got a dozen death rods playing russian-roulette with everyone on the planet and Bruce Willis doesnt even know what year it is and I doubt Ben Affleck is up for the task!!... ..ehh sorry for the rant, but sadly it would be 'safer' for us all to put nukes on that thing.. Ben Affleck as Batman can cut the wires on a nuke, but best he can do to a giant metal pole is ride it like a Horsey as it takes out all of Rhode Island
One of the problems would be that objects ultimately "desire" to rotate about their largest moment of inertia. This means that the 20-foot rods would try to tumble end-over-end, or, at the very least, upon hitting the atmosphere, settle into a horizontal orientation with respect to the surface of the Earth. To counter this, each rod would probably need tailfins, to keep the rod oriented correctly.
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In WW1 they already used steel flechettes dropped from planes against infantry.
Our company did proposal work on the "RodsFromGods" program, because we knew how to do guidance systems for RVs (reentry vehicles, aka nukes). With RVs this is fairly straightforward since they are about 99% aerodynamically stable. Needing only 1% control authority requires minimal controls, and can often be done inertially inside the actual body, as opposed to needing external fins or active-air devices. The main problem with using an actual rod, as mentioned, is that it is not stable in re-entry, especially at the front, where it is randomly burning off and ablating material. We used similar modeling as used for the ablative heat-shields on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Our controllers could have made this program work, but with the advent of micronukes, mininukes, and ordinary nukes, along with drones loaded with explosives, the energy, weight, difficulty, and cost of the Rods idea became just stupid. If you are going to drop a "rock" onto the enemy using a drone, then just putting a high-energetic "dynamite-rock" on it, will produce 100-to-100000 times the explosive effect. That is what is going on now in the UKR and RUS areas. "Drones-From-God" will soon become the new standard, and these can be launched from low-orbit and use simple heat shielding, and then use GPS plus Inertial guidance to hit a target within about one-foot error circle. Don't tell the Chinese or Russians about this.
Yeah, I've noticed that this person, or group of people(?), is bias. And tries to convert you to his way of thinking. I like Some of the content that he does, but he can be Very biased. You have to root around for the relevant information. This is doable but very expensive to get up to orbit. It's as if he's part of a disinformation program (?), sorry but it seems like this at times...
STUPID NAMING: Why would GOD send such horrible destruction on anybody? My god would never do that. Are these people worshipping the wrong god? These weapons are ALL from HUMANS. Let's call them Rods from Vengeful Scoundrels.
Also consider conservation of energy. Whatever you expect to get from the impact, the same (or realistically a lot more) energy you have to put in first, from fuel. Nukes have their "own power", a very efficient nuclear power, not expensive rocket fuel.
"Then we told the public it was too expensive. hahahahahaha" - 1980s, two generals in the E ring talking about Rods from God program before it went black.
It sounds mostly like a leadership removal weapon. Very short lead time means you can act on intelligence quickly before the target can move, humongous penetration means no bunker can protect you. Also, why do you think the original idea was a featureless cylinder? People in the 50s weren't dumber than now. Obviously, you have to brake and use guidance and thus control surfaces. They knew about orbital mechanics.
Uhm... Tungsten is not the element with the highest melting point. Carbon for example has a melting point of 3550°C (about 128 C° higher than Tungsten) and Hafnium carbonitride (a relatively simple compound) has a melting point of around 4000 °C, way higher than Tungsten. The issue those two have is that they are both brittle (if most of the rod doesn't survive reentry, the weapon would be a pretty pointless contraption) and in the case of Carbon it is also too light (not ideal if you want to minimize drag). Tungsten, I believe, has the distinction of being the _metallic element_ with the highest melting point. Also, as many have pointed out, Einstein's equations for relativistic energy wouldn't come into play here. They could if you were throwing antimatter rods, but that would be quite a pointless exercise, as those would annihilate quite spectacularly way before reaching the troposphere. Edit: wording.
The reason why the rod from god is not practical is there are more effective weapons systems which can do the same thing. In the 2003 Air Force report a 6.1 by 0.3 metres (20 ft × 1 ft) tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach 10 (11,200 ft/s; 3,400 m/s) has kinetic energy equivalent to approximately 11.5 tons of TNT. This is not a nuclear like explosion, although it is a big blast. The GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is a precision-guided, 30,000-pound (14,000 kg) "bunker buster" bomb which can do pretty much the same thing as a rod from god. The angular momentum issue, while real, can be resolved by launching from a higher orbit and or allowing the rod to lose angular momentum in the same way as a normal re-entry does so. This will reduce the kinetic energy, so even this solution does not fully solve this issue. While a factor the angular momentum issue is an engineering issue which is solvable, what is not solvable is the poor cost/benefit of this weapon system.
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I could only imagine dropping Lizzo from outer space or Chris Christie from the Fifth Element " Big Ba da boom."
It would just make us slightly large hole in the ground. I’m not saying that’s not devastating but from a cost perspective this makes absolutely no sense. Just getting that much weight to space would bankrupt the entire project.
I don't know, I just feel like one of these rods would super quickly BUT very quietly just enter deeply into the ground and that would be it, have any of these eve been tested?
Did anyone tried to figure out if the fusion core of a thermonuclear bomb were placed near the front you would have a thermonuclear blast? It seems plausible.
Maybe it sounds stupid, but would it be possible to have a station at a lagrange point, from which you could "drop" a rod in a straight line towards it's target? I know these Points are far away, but wouldn't it be "geostationary" meaning no extra horizontal speed? Thanks for your input.
No, if you just release something, it will have same orbit as object it released from. To steer something from stable orbit into collision course some maneuver needed, which requires energy, rocket engine or other way to change velocity of that something. It doesn't work in a way some nut on a satellite goes loose and falls straight down on earth. It still moves on same trajectory and flies around at least for some time.
Seems like a GREAT idea to me... weapons of 'massive destruction' in space without them being actual 'weapons', thus effectively skirting the space treaty against weapons in space. With starship being basically operational its an attainable goal to put a crap ton of these up there aimed at problematic countries like North Korea, and at a pretty dang good price compared to the cost of manufacturing the same number of nuclear bombs along with deployment infrastructure. Slap a hypergolic engine and a few actuating fins on the rods along with fairly simple guidence computers and you have a weapon that can't be stopped once dispatched! But yeah.... back in the 60s? Forget about it.
Youre really overestimating how difficult targeting would be. A simple guidance package and grid fins would solve it. We have guided artillery and bombs, this would be no different.
An object under no acceleration moves in a straight line; it's the rest of the universe which acts on said object, including providing a curved surface moving at some velocity relative to said object and providing various accelerations such as gravity and atmospheric drag
I am actually surprised you mentioned anime because I always think of The World's Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat when talking about Rods From God.
The only part of starship that makes me really nervous, is that starship's payload capacity would theoretically allow the USSF to deploy a true "rods from god" weapon.
It's a dumb idea. Most engineers with basic commonsense will dismiss it. If all of expected damages are to be done by kinetic energy, then the damage is very easy to estimate. It would never do more than exploding the rocket on the pad. In reality it's much worse as most of rocket's energy is wasted on dead weight and air friction turned into heat and dissipated back into air again. Chinese military actually did the experiment years ago and verified it's a dumb idea. No surprise. I wish they could produce a myth busters episode for it.
@@OGPatriot03 though this clearly violates international treaties, I believe the X37B and equivalent Shenlong(devine dragon) can already do this. There're probably 2 reasons they choose not to. First it's much too counterproductive. To put such heavy objects in geosynchronous orbit is too expensive and does too little. If these are in LEO then they're not above targets most of the time and have no obvious advantages over ICBMs or hypersonic missiles. Secondly once one starts to do this all space assets are fair games and you end up losing much more than potential gains. This is also why spy satellites are tolerated all these years.
I can by myself solve at least 3 of your so called problems of this system. To make the rod fly straight, you make it spin. Either mechanically by the start from the satellite or by fins or cold gas/hos gas spin thrusters. The initial start propulsion can easily made by a small cold gas or rocket motor. The targeting system that you say must have high end A.I. for all the parameters to hit a target is a little bit exaggerated. This is no magic, just calculation and can already easily be done. Getting such a sattelite with let´s say 20-30 shots ammunition into space with Elons upcoming spacecraft or it´s successor, which will be able to bring 300 tons into space, such a "Rods from God" system is no problem. I am not convinced that such a system would not work very fine.
Yeah but at that point you don't have a rod from god, you have a guided missile launched from space, which is a completely different kind of weapon from what was originally envisioned by the "big dumb kinetic impactor" the military cooked up, which is the point of this video.
@@roberthesser6402 The Military was well aware of all of the aforementioned parameters, it'd be silly to assume that anything mentioned here would have been a surprise....
It's not a US idea... Germany had the design and idea during WW2......and they were also the only ones with jet engines and rockets that could use them.... Hence after the war... The head of NASA.... Was the same guy that did the v2 during the war.... This Jerry guy... It wasn't his idea. Germans had the idea for space stations as well... All back in days before and during WW2....
You mean being at 36 000km away? That is a lot of push you have to do to get to Earth to begin with. Then you have to slow down and target. Not easier I think, I can be wrong.
That's an orbit where the spacecraft is moving at the rotational speed of the Earth's surface, so the craft still has very high velocity. You still have to slow it down to zero relative velocity before any released weapon would just fall straight down. Edit: My bad, this is geostationary. Geosynchronous is an orbit that puts the craft above the same ground point once every 24 hours, i.e. in synch with 1 earth day. No matter what, all orbits are moving at incredible speeds to stay aloft.
This may be the worst video ever released on this channel. I'm surprised you narrated this one yourself given how little effort went into the rest of it.
Can you stop using imperial units please? They are anoying, and it's not for nothing that almost all science and engineering in the world is done using the metric system.
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And yet another youtuber that I'm unsubscribing from. I unsubscribe from any youtuber that promotes this scam company.
Hey, I'm pretty sure Project Pluto was a more sinister idea than dropping some metal sticks.
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You mean the flat earth society has members all around the disk. (lol!)
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An oldie but a goodie. 😅
You might wanna get rid of better help. Many people have very negative reviews of their help.
You mean like selling your data (that is your psychological problem) to anyone with 2$ in his pocket?
Yeah we gotta be careful with that company. A terrible history and they haven't gotten much better, aside from what they were forced to do by the FTC because what they were doing was illegal. Morally though, they haven't improved.
Why does everyone all of a sudden have a bad experience with Better Help? I've never heard of them till everyone started complaining in the comments.
@@tomaccino It is just the logical step for people selling personal data, think about it.
You could say that about all therapy. Entire industry is a scam preying on the incredibly stupid
You're not considering that they could simply put a guidance package like the JDAM uses, only made for re-entry. It has fins and a brain to guide it. Acting like it would just be a simple pole dropped is kinda silly. It would have some sort of guidance systems in place.
E = mc² isn’t relevant to a kinetic energy weapon - the energy of the mass is not released, just its momentum.
AKA "Thor's Hammer", a proposal for a space weapon. Basically a steel rod with a tiny aiming brain.
Jerry Pournelle, a guy who was an expert in almost everything. Polymath.
If you're interested one of his novels with Larry Niven "Footfall" uses the idea.
Footfall is one of the best alien invasion stories ever. He came up with a scenario where humans actually have a chance.
I have enjoyed these gentlemen's books for decades.
Controlling the orientation during descent would not be that difficult. Simply contain the majority of the mass at the "front" of the rod, much like an arrow.
Jerry Pournelle is arguably best known as a science fiction writer and (for those old enough to remember) columnist for Byte magazine.
A 9-ton tungsten rod hitting Earth at orbital speed (7.8 km/s) would release about 458 GJ of energy, equivalent to 109.5 tons of TNT.
Ek = (1/2) * 9000 kg * (7800 m/s)^2 = 458 GJ
458 GJ / (4.184 * 10^9 J/Tonne TNT) = 109.5 Tons TNT
- MOAB: ~11 tons TNT
- Hiroshima (Little Boy): ~15,000 tons TNT
- Modern nuclear bombs: several million tons TNT
So, the rod's impact is like 10 MOABs but far less than a nuclear bomb.
Thanks for doing the math on that. This was exactly what I was looking for in the comments. Thanks again, Cheers.
While I agree with most of it (and you are being quite generous with the rods by not considering drag), there are some _tactical nukes_ with comparable yields (e.g.: a B61 bomb could yield as little as 0.3 kt). Also, a pretty signifcant chunk of the energy released by a nuke is "wasted" in the form of radiation that escapes the Earth, so I believe it could be a fair comparison with a small yield tactical nuke.
@@fort-j Good point about drag and the B61 comparison. Thanks for the perspective!
The trouble with this is that you first have to hoist these heavy RFG's up into orbit and load them into a launch platform. Also, they are very inaccurate. This concept was looked into by the military several decades ago ad rejected as impractical
You ever hear of retrofire and guidance?
I think you're overthinking things, my dude. Most of these issues have already been solved, especially the targeting. MIRV nuclear warheads are neither powered, nor steered to their targets. They're merely aimed upon release from the MIRV vehicle, and follow a simple ballistic trajectory - with a quick spin initiated by a motor for anti-tumble stability. Similar to barrel rifling, but without the barrel. There's no directional control, nor thrust emanating from them, and they fall like a bolt of lightning till they go boom. Lots of youtube vids showing the speeds at which they enter (video from weapons tests). They're traveling so fast, it looks like a lightning strike.
The only issue would be getting a crapload of tungsten weight up there to begin with.
..and keeping it up there.. Everything in low earth orbit needs a boost now and then to keep from crashing into earth..
Nukes, Satellites etc can all burn up 'harmlessly' when we get tired of them.. but this thing would be a nightmare to maintain, de-orbit... and if you forget to fill the gas tank, worst case scenario is you accidentally take out 'France'..
Kinetic bombardment is not a bad idea, but not very practical. We have known this for decades.
_Worst idea?_ Hardly... Imagine the damage a single impactor could do to a single city. Now spread them around the planet.
*Rods From The Gods* would be easily implemented by a few dozen *StarShips* floating in _Synchronous Orbit_ just sitting there, looming, but not violating any *Nuclear Treaties.*
They could be released, guided by simple chemical rockets to any GPS coordinate on the planet, and make one hell of a splash or splat when they hit the ground.
I appreciate that this video tackles some of the obvious problems with this concept that are rarely addressed. However I would like to bring to your attention that in order for the rod's hypothetical orbital trajectory to intercept the earth's surface you don't HAVE to lower your orbital velocity.
If Kerbal Space Program has taught me right, you can burn Radially or anti-Radially (towards the Nadir or the Zenith, aka toward or away from the planet's center) to adjust the eccentricity of your orbit whilst maintaining orbital velocity. As for aiming, if Mechjeb can do it then I think the Space Force could manage..
you wouldn't have to make a massive platform in space to launch these god rods, you'd just need a to use equal thrust in the opposite direction against the launch thrust for the rod from god. Like a PRIG launcher or recoilless rifle.
Control fins and a booster with thrust vectoring would solve most of the issues you cited.
I think you took “dropping a rod” too literal. They wouldn’t literally drop a tungsten rod. It would have control surfaces and likely a booster engine to launch and direct the rod.
It’s all fun and games until you have to deorbit the platform at the end of its service life.
On a different note, having a simple solid rocket booster and a basic guidance package is normal for modern missiles. Worst comes to worst, the guidance fins, computers, and solid rocket motor are just regularly swapped out from the top of a metal rod. It’s far cheaper than replacing the entire unit, and it’s probably cheaper still than having a nuclear silo program.
Similarly, you don’t need to drop it directly down, just cause it to have a suborbital trajectory like any classical ballistic missile and boom. Weapon. If you watch a video of ballistic missile reentry test vehicles (for nuclear missile tests) they come to impact site at like a 35degree angle above the horizon.
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Great idea if we could get them to orbit. If the launch system were maneuverable it would be the ultimate first strike weapon at 5 mi/sec.
This is also why there is no such thing as time travel. Every thing the universe is moving at tremendous speeds. There is no way to calculate every variable.
First, Rods from God has nothing to do with atomic weapons. The equation you are looking for is (KE = 0.5 × m × v²) not (E=MC^2). Also, it's been over thirty years since I read Dr. Pournelle's paper but I seem to remember he mentioned the words small rocket motor and guidance system in relation to the rods. A small solid rocket motor and control fins would make this an effective and devastating weapon. Solid rocket motors do not need pumps and fuel tanks BTW. Dr. Pournelle was an avid space enthusiast and I assure you he had a good grasp of orbital mechanics. He was well aware of the problems involved and knew it was a bit more complicated than "dropping a rod from orbit". If you want to be taken seriously I would advise you to actually read the related source materials, not just the leftist peacenik talking points.
I would like to add that I am deeply disappointed in you. Throwing shade on a good man who is no longer here to defend himself. Shame on you. Thumbs down, get your facts straight before you post.
What goes up, must come down. If the launcher was to malfunction and lose orbit, those things are coming down somewhere and there is nothing we could to do control where it lands. While we can blow up sataelights that have this issue, nothing short of a nuke is going to affect a 8 ton tungsten rod.
Yeah that's is if you take on heating the bombs shell it explodes before hitting anything on the surface
@10:20 I'm sorry but you _ass-u-me_ that any rod would be released without some form of rocket-propelled _guidance system._
@10:50 The fall would not be from 200 miles, but from 35,786 km (22,236 miles.)
5:38 Gi joe 2 stole this exact idea and called it project zeus and had pretty animation.
Tungsten Rods
@@ibxmushu yh
The rods will simply have tails on them and and operate like a laser guided bomb, not hard.
'Earthquake bombs' Look up the Grand Slam and Tall Boy. Invented by the same guy who invented the bouncing bomb.
A friend of mine was just ranting to me this morning about how dumb Rods from God is, and now im seeing this lol
Complaining about things is a Rant. So pointing out the dangers of anything is "over the top" - Rant is getting to be a popular way of belittling an opinion. Maybe we should be grateful to your friend. This Rods from God idea has been around for a good while now. Its son of Rail Gun and that other Regan stuff.
The folks from the “20 and back program” uses rail guns on Mars. But that’s for lower ranking “bait” soldiers.
What are you saying? Please elaborate@@davebooth5608
Yeah our phones/computers have been spying on us for a while now.. we were bustin the balls of some 20yr old kid at our work like 5yrs ago for not knowing who iron maiden was.. 20mins later he comes up with his phone, he went to buy a t-shirt from the site he always used and it was nothing but iron maiden shirts on the front page.. its just gonna get crazier with this AI stuff ..
Oh and 'Rods from the Gods' are dumb.. everything in orbit needs a boost every now and then to keep from crashing back to earth.. satellites are 'small'/less dense, enough to mostly burn up in the atmosphere and 'safely' crash in the ocean when they run out of juice/are no longer needed.. nukes can be 'turned off' or destroyed easily..
The Rods WILL have to come down someday whether used or not, but its gonna make a big boom(s) or tidal wave(s) when it does.. and its gonna cost a lot of money to maintain/fuel in that time.. and a micro meteorite (or disgruntled country) could take out an important component at any time and now we got a dozen death rods playing russian-roulette with everyone on the planet and Bruce Willis doesnt even know what year it is and I doubt Ben Affleck is up for the task!!...
..ehh sorry for the rant, but sadly it would be 'safer' for us all to put nukes on that thing.. Ben Affleck as Batman can cut the wires on a nuke, but best he can do to a giant metal pole is ride it like a Horsey as it takes out all of Rhode Island
Lol, you made this sound so complicated. Truth is.... It's not. These rods in 2024 could easily be deployed and accurate today.
One of the problems would be that objects ultimately "desire" to rotate about their largest moment of inertia. This means that the 20-foot rods would try to tumble end-over-end, or, at the very least, upon hitting the atmosphere, settle into a horizontal orientation with respect to the surface of the Earth. To counter this, each rod would probably need tailfins, to keep the rod oriented correctly.
In WW1 they already used steel flechettes dropped from planes against infantry.
I would stop advertising better help...
I love the idea of a space force. I hope we have had it for the last 70 years
Our company did proposal work on the "RodsFromGods" program, because we knew how to do guidance systems for RVs (reentry vehicles, aka nukes). With RVs this is fairly straightforward since they are about 99% aerodynamically stable. Needing only 1% control authority requires minimal controls, and can often be done inertially inside the actual body, as opposed to needing external fins or active-air devices. The main problem with using an actual rod, as mentioned, is that it is not stable in re-entry, especially at the front, where it is randomly burning off and ablating material. We used similar modeling as used for the ablative heat-shields on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Our controllers could have made this program work, but with the advent of micronukes, mininukes, and ordinary nukes, along with drones loaded with explosives, the energy, weight, difficulty, and cost of the Rods idea became just stupid. If you are going to drop a "rock" onto the enemy using a drone, then just putting a high-energetic "dynamite-rock" on it, will produce 100-to-100000 times the explosive effect. That is what is going on now in the UKR and RUS areas. "Drones-From-God" will soon become the new standard, and these can be launched from low-orbit and use simple heat shielding, and then use GPS plus Inertial guidance to hit a target within about one-foot error circle. Don't tell the Chinese or Russians about this.
Yeah, I've noticed that this person, or group of people(?), is bias. And tries to convert you to his way of thinking. I like Some of the content that he does, but he can be Very biased. You have to root around for the relevant information. This is doable but very expensive to get up to orbit.
It's as if he's part of a disinformation program (?), sorry but it seems like this at times...
STUPID NAMING: Why would GOD send such horrible destruction on anybody? My god would never do that. Are these people worshipping the wrong god? These weapons are ALL from HUMANS. Let's call them Rods from Vengeful Scoundrels.
Also consider conservation of energy. Whatever you expect to get from the impact, the same (or realistically a lot more) energy you have to put in first, from fuel. Nukes have their "own power", a very efficient nuclear power, not expensive rocket fuel.
yes. this is exactly what Einstein meant.
It wouldn't be a blunt ended rod. It would be a projectile with built-in guidance and fins.
*Admin repeatedly going offtopic from space race* 😂😂😂😂 kinetic effect of war
Veru happy the are including a military aspect to some of the newer videos.
"Then we told the public it was too expensive. hahahahahaha" - 1980s, two generals in the E ring talking about Rods from God program before it went black.
❤ It! Now I know where another channel got that term related to 12g shotgun shells with tungsten rods
Okay so that's what SpaceX could offer to the US army if they ever need something they can only get from them, like help with nuclear propulsion.
It sounds mostly like a leadership removal weapon. Very short lead time means you can act on intelligence quickly before the target can move, humongous penetration means no bunker can protect you.
Also, why do you think the original idea was a featureless cylinder? People in the 50s weren't dumber than now. Obviously, you have to brake and use guidance and thus control surfaces. They knew about orbital mechanics.
I like how the title calls is a 'secret' weapon, which clearly it would not be if there's a video about it *rolls eyes*
Uhm... Tungsten is not the element with the highest melting point. Carbon for example has a melting point of 3550°C (about 128 C° higher than Tungsten) and Hafnium carbonitride (a relatively simple compound) has a melting point of around 4000 °C, way higher than Tungsten. The issue those two have is that they are both brittle (if most of the rod doesn't survive reentry, the weapon would be a pretty pointless contraption) and in the case of Carbon it is also too light (not ideal if you want to minimize drag). Tungsten, I believe, has the distinction of being the _metallic element_ with the highest melting point.
Also, as many have pointed out, Einstein's equations for relativistic energy wouldn't come into play here. They could if you were throwing antimatter rods, but that would be quite a pointless exercise, as those would annihilate quite spectacularly way before reaching the troposphere.
Edit: wording.
The reason why the rod from god is not practical is there are more effective weapons systems which can do the same thing. In the 2003 Air Force report a 6.1 by 0.3 metres (20 ft × 1 ft) tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach 10 (11,200 ft/s; 3,400 m/s) has kinetic energy equivalent to approximately 11.5 tons of TNT. This is not a nuclear like explosion, although it is a big blast. The GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is a precision-guided, 30,000-pound (14,000 kg) "bunker buster" bomb which can do pretty much the same thing as a rod from god.
The angular momentum issue, while real, can be resolved by launching from a higher orbit and or allowing the rod to lose angular momentum in the same way as a normal re-entry does so. This will reduce the kinetic energy, so even this solution does not fully solve this issue. While a factor the angular momentum issue is an engineering issue which is solvable, what is not solvable is the poor cost/benefit of this weapon system.
I could only imagine dropping Lizzo from outer space or Chris Christie from the Fifth Element " Big Ba da boom."
I love you guys. Always a kewl video.
The problem is getting them up there. You would have to use a rocket such as Starship in a non reusable configuration
You would need to shoot two projectiles at once: one towards the target and one in the opposite direction to counteract.
It would just make us slightly large hole in the ground. I’m not saying that’s not devastating but from a cost perspective this makes absolutely no sense. Just getting that much weight to space would bankrupt the entire project.
I don't know, I just feel like one of these rods would super quickly BUT very quietly just enter deeply into the ground and that would be it, have any of these eve been tested?
Did anyone tried to figure out if the fusion core of a thermonuclear bomb were placed near the front you would have a thermonuclear blast? It seems plausible.
Maybe it sounds stupid, but would it be possible to have a station at a lagrange point, from which you could "drop" a rod in a straight line towards it's target? I know these Points are far away, but wouldn't it be "geostationary" meaning no extra horizontal speed? Thanks for your input.
No, if you just release something, it will have same orbit as object it released from. To steer something from stable orbit into collision course some maneuver needed, which requires energy, rocket engine or other way to change velocity of that something. It doesn't work in a way some nut on a satellite goes loose and falls straight down on earth. It still moves on same trajectory and flies around at least for some time.
Seems like a GREAT idea to me... weapons of 'massive destruction' in space without them being actual 'weapons', thus effectively skirting the space treaty against weapons in space.
With starship being basically operational its an attainable goal to put a crap ton of these up there aimed at problematic countries like North Korea, and at a pretty dang good price compared to the cost of manufacturing the same number of nuclear bombs along with deployment infrastructure. Slap a hypergolic engine and a few actuating fins on the rods along with fairly simple guidence computers and you have a weapon that can't be stopped once dispatched!
But yeah.... back in the 60s? Forget about it.
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Youre really overestimating how difficult targeting would be. A simple guidance package and grid fins would solve it. We have guided artillery and bombs, this would be no different.
Call of Duty had a pretty good video of what these would be like
An object under no acceleration moves in a straight line; it's the rest of the universe which acts on said object, including providing a curved surface moving at some velocity relative to said object and providing various accelerations such as gravity and atmospheric drag
So basically a real life Project Zeus
The biggest problem: there is not that much energy greater than a nuclear bomb.
I am actually surprised you mentioned anime because I always think of The World's Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat when talking about Rods From God.
The only part of starship that makes me really nervous, is that starship's payload capacity would theoretically allow the USSF to deploy a true "rods from god" weapon.
Love you all, long time fan. Please don't partner with BetterHelp. They are terrible.
Why don’t they build a spaceship totally made out of tungsten if it can survive re-entry from space?
Wow. You're usually better than this.
Poor analogies, poor comparisons, and even poorer research.
Who wrote this?
We're watching a conspiracy video about a space weapon. It's a bit late for help.
Please, use Metric system as well for sizes. Usually the world doesn't have any idea the size of foot, inch, etc...
Wolfram I like to call it by it's ream name. Tungsten pfff laughable
Hypersonic Anti missile won't work?
GI Joe 2's Zeus.
how do you so consistently write like a bot?
You know that we weren't supposed to be on the surface of the earth Right??
please explain?
God's rod
Why dose this sound like call of duty ghost😅
8:39 lol!!
Ok , well lets get the ol calculator out here, uhhhh,,, no what ever you say.
It's a dumb idea. Most engineers with basic commonsense will dismiss it. If all of expected damages are to be done by kinetic energy, then the damage is very easy to estimate. It would never do more than exploding the rocket on the pad. In reality it's much worse as most of rocket's energy is wasted on dead weight and air friction turned into heat and dissipated back into air again.
Chinese military actually did the experiment years ago and verified it's a dumb idea. No surprise. I wish they could produce a myth busters episode for it.
The obvious advantage is time to impact, which can't be beat.
@@OGPatriot03 though this clearly violates international treaties, I believe the X37B and equivalent Shenlong(devine dragon) can already do this. There're probably 2 reasons they choose not to. First it's much too counterproductive. To put such heavy objects in geosynchronous orbit is too expensive and does too little. If these are in LEO then they're not above targets most of the time and have no obvious advantages over ICBMs or hypersonic missiles. Secondly once one starts to do this all space assets are fair games and you end up losing much more than potential gains. This is also why spy satellites are tolerated all these years.
Batarians say, oh well ... 😁
The most dangerous is altering an asteroids course to destroy a country on Earth.😂😂
Let's talk about space x without calling the video space x.
Grief.. this is rubbish.. do some research
Exactly. I am deeply disappointed in Space Race for posting this video.
The US should have militarized spacen 1950s .... soon u will all understand why
I can by myself solve at least 3 of your so called problems of this system. To make the rod fly straight, you make it spin. Either mechanically by the start from the satellite or by fins or cold gas/hos gas spin thrusters. The initial start propulsion can easily made by a small cold gas or rocket motor. The targeting system that you say must have high end A.I. for all the parameters to hit a target is a little bit exaggerated. This is no magic, just calculation and can already easily be done. Getting such a sattelite with let´s say 20-30 shots ammunition into space with Elons upcoming spacecraft or it´s successor, which will be able to bring 300 tons into space, such a "Rods from God" system is no problem. I am not convinced that such a system would not work very fine.
Yeah but at that point you don't have a rod from god, you have a guided missile launched from space, which is a completely different kind of weapon from what was originally envisioned by the "big dumb kinetic impactor" the military cooked up, which is the point of this video.
@@roberthesser6402 The Military was well aware of all of the aforementioned parameters, it'd be silly to assume that anything mentioned here would have been a surprise....
It's not a US idea... Germany had the design and idea during WW2......and they were also the only ones with jet engines and rockets that could use them.... Hence after the war... The head of NASA.... Was the same guy that did the v2 during the war.... This Jerry guy... It wasn't his idea. Germans had the idea for space stations as well... All back in days before and during WW2....
i tried this is kerbal space program and it dident work :-(
Why is everyone bombing Greenland?
This is big
Well it aint secret if its in a yt video XD
whatch the last GI Joe movie
Tungsten Rain
Taking out the Russians bunkers
Tungsten rain
what about from a geosynchronous orbit ?
You mean being at 36 000km away? That is a lot of push you have to do to get to Earth to begin with.
Then you have to slow down and target. Not easier I think, I can be wrong.
That would be even harder as it would be going even faster and have to travel even further.
That's an orbit where the spacecraft is moving at the rotational speed of the Earth's surface, so the craft still has very high velocity. You still have to slow it down to zero relative velocity before any released weapon would just fall straight down.
Edit: My bad, this is geostationary. Geosynchronous is an orbit that puts the craft above the same ground point once every 24 hours, i.e. in synch with 1 earth day.
No matter what, all orbits are moving at incredible speeds to stay aloft.
This may be the worst video ever released on this channel. I'm surprised you narrated this one yourself given how little effort went into the rest of it.
Chad US military planners vs. Virgin the Space race
Impulse
Thank You Space Race ... for showing some Intelligence and Common Sense ... a rare commodity on TH-cam Space Channels .... Cheers ! :-]
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Not as catchy
Can you stop using imperial units please? They are anoying, and it's not for nothing that almost all science and engineering in the world is done using the metric system.
If it's a bad idea, you can bet the military thought it.