Orbital kinetic energy weapons are best weapons. Prove me wrong Jow Forums. Protip: you can't

You can't fire a laser from orbit at the surface of the earth without it costing gigajoules of energy. The more distance you cover, the more power the laser needs. But the more power the laser has, the more of it is wasted on turning air into plasma which attenuates the beam to shit.

And if you want to fire it more than once a month, the solar panels for such a weapon would be tens of times larger than the entire ISS.

That's a chemical laser, you faggot. The ammo it uses weighs on par with a kinetic energy weapon.

>multi-billion dollar weapon system sitting out there completely in the open where any chinksit ASAT can hit it

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>orders of magnitude more expensive than an airstrike
Did you consider that you might not have a single aircraft inside the atmosphere of the planet your bombarding?

>>What are solar arrays
What are reflective solar sails that have never been constructed yet due to cost and complexity?

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>shooting down deterrence placed in geostationary orbit
Good luck, lel

Lol imagine being this retarded, do you know how a chemical laser works?

Oh look, another insecure and immature sixteen year old who thinks playing retard of Jow Forums will make him one of the cool kids.

Attenuation through 100km of atmosphere is negligable at the beam intensity we're talking, combined with the lense system off the yal-1(Which had an effective range of 600km). the current solar cells on the iss generate 170ish kw, and those panels are inneficient by today's standards a solar array of 1 1/3 of iss should siffice

A solar sail is completely different than a photovaltaic panel, and since you insist on being this ignorant, we've built solar sails, we have them in orbit right now, granted only one is over 5m but that's not the point

> Prove me wrong Jow Forums.
All the energy you get from the Impact was used to put the rods in space to begin with - Ballistic use of the rods would be more effective

Inefficient compared to tungsten poles fired by ICBM directly.

What, no one ever proposed this one? Because it's just as stupid.

Imagine being so ignorant you want to put solar panels in space, convert the energy instead of just using a county sized reflective sail that focuses 50 square miles of sunlight to a pinpoint.

Because a 50^2 mile reflective sheet is prohibitively heavy and expensive, compared to proven tech we have built and tested. Photon pressure alone turns the whole thing into a sail too, so you have to deal with all that thrust the thing is generating. Not saying its impossible, it's just assinine.

you dont have to destroy it, just render it inoperable

I too have played Children of a Dead Earth

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It was good while it lasted.

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50^2 = 2500 you dolt
did math get hard for you when they put letters in the equations?

Disposable chemical reagents. You basically have a laser that runs on ammo and electricity.

>Tiny blast radius

Not if you attach engines to a comet and steer it into the Earth.

You could make the entire combined US and Russian nuclear arsenal look like a child's toy with a Yucatan sized asteroid.

50 squared in sn is 50^2

I never once said we would use a chemical laser, if that where the case wtf would the solar panels be for

Meh, lasers tend to have terrible efficiency and are only good against drone and missile builds. A gun build with good armor tends to run them down and can't miss those radiators.

How do you deal with micromediorites that turn you reflective surface into sandpaper in a year

But we count have to deal with gin builds for at least another 10 years, in the meantime lasers are the lightest(ie best) solution

Radiators actually. Even a chemical laser generates massive amounts of heat. You can't really flush out all that heat with the reagents so the whole thing tends to need massive radiators to cool things down.

Besides, anything past Mars isn't running weapons on a practical square meterage of solar pannels. The energy just isn't there.

Directed energy nuclear weapons.
Adapts the drive plate of a nuclear bomb propulsion device into a directed energy weapon.

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Jokes aside, we're talking earth geo orbit with this thing. Think of it as a "defense" platform.

>But we count have to deal with gin builds

I'm sorry but this is not a valid english sentence. Would you like to try again?

They're great in vacume, but atmosphere seriously limits them, might as well just nuke the target if your gonna fire nukes in the first place.

*Won't have to deal with gun builds

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>They're great in vacume, but atmosphere seriously limits them, might as well just nuke the target if your gonna fire nukes in the first place.
More than enough power to shoot down from orbit and deliver shots on target.

Then you either have issues with cooling when up against ground based systems. A ground based anti-orbital laser has more mass for cooling than any satellite so you'll probably be slagged in a real fight. A geosync orbit means they also have all day to do just that.

Lasers are only the lightest if you discount the cooling and power systems. If you don't then the lightest is actually missiles if you count dry weight and railguns if you don't.

But you need to position it to hit the target, and that's a narrow window before your angle is steep enough to put the target out of range, so it makes sense to have the casaba howitzer on a missile that can maneuver to the correct or it etc. But at that point you might as well use a nuke if your going to fire one anyway, if the target needs a precision strike why use a nuke when we have cruise missiles.

Doesn't have to be geosynchronous

>But at that point you might as well use a nuke if your going to fire one anyway
The enemy might be fielding laser missiles or casaba howitzer missiles of his own in anti-missile defense

Then what's stopping him from taking down your howitzers when they get into range

30 tonnes of TNT equivalent at literally cosmic price. Useless and slow piece of shit. Fuck off.

>Then what's stopping him from taking down your howitzers when they get into range
numbers

>a shittier version of an ICBM that can be rekt by any country capable of building a space gun at a fraction of the cost
>yfw middle east countries were planning to build space guns literally 30 years ago

True, but that's what I assume a "Geo" orbit is. A LEO orbit has it's own issues to deal with. Mostly, ambushes with sub orbital kinetic kill submunitions. And by that I mean flak that has enough altitude to reach the satellite but not enough speed to stay in orbit. Because there's so many pieces it's impossible to shoot down it all.

And here we see the issues with space to earth weapons systems. We have the capabilities it would provide, there are so many ways to disable it that it doesn't make sense to build it unless you can conceal it and keep it secret, but that only works once. If war ever broke out we might put them up, but it's unlikely.

>Prove me wrong

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Please don't tell me you think you can just "drop" something from orbit. Orbit is freefall. Even after you spend tons of fuel just getting the thing into orbit, you're going to need another assload of fuel to break orbit quickly enough to make it relevant as a weapon, and that fuel is going to need extra fuel just to get it up there. Without mind-bending amounts of fuel, you're looking at a weapon that takes days or weeks from firing to impact.
You're honestly better off just mailing sticks of dynamite to the target.

>implying thousands of g's of acceleration won't be enough

>common core moron
50 square miles is not equal to 50^2 you blithering idiot

Why didn't the space shuttle look like sandpaper or all the paint sandblasted off after every mission?
"Relatively close" in space terms is one grain thousands of kms apart.

If the re-entry angle is too low It bounds back out, if too deep it will shatter from impact compression in the upper atmosphere
They where worried about this with apollo missions

No it's not, your right, now if you'd stop pretending to be a moron 50^2=50 "squared", and since you want a 50 square mile sheet I don't see whats so hard to understand here

The space shuttle isn't 50 miles wide and doesn't rely on it's mirrored finish for efficiency and it's not up there permanently

you stupid mother fucking welfare recipient
50 does not equal 50 times 50
stupid fucking jamal

Sandpaper is graded by grit
A sail becoming 400 grit sandpaper in one year
would mean a space shuttle would become 8 grit in a week's time

ITS NOT 50x50 it's a way of saying 50 squares without writting the word "square" unfortunately I was too naive to assume anyone reading this board wasn't a mouth breathing retard who can't think outside their minute sphere of understanding. It is common to notate numbers this way 50^2 = 50 square 50^3=50 cube as in 50 square miles or 50 cubic miles, etc.

You get my point dipshit the surface is gonna get povkmarked by micrometeorites to the point it becomes an ineficiant reflector and just absorbes heat.

you dopey drug addict

50 miles = 50 miles

50^2 = 50 miles x 50 miles = 2,500 SQUARE miles

50^3 = 50 x 50 x 50 = 125,000 CUBIC miles

>You get my point dipshit the surface is gonna get povkmarked by micrometeorites to the point it becomes an ineficiant reflector and just absorbes heat.
it would take thousands of years for that to happen
if you dipped a spoon into yogurt
let the spoon get moldy
it would have more combined intelligence than your entire family since the dawn of time

>50x50= 2500 SQUARE miles
Um user
>50x50x50= 125000 CUBIC miles
Oh boy
Mile is a distance measurement, not a shape

Go look up how many micrmeterites impact the ISS annually then get back to me

link the russian fun cannon

Nice duplicate thread you fucking retard. These are and always will be a dumb fucking idea.

>best weapons
Best at what? They’re only unrivaled in bunker busting or for the rare occasion that you might need the equivalent force of a small yield nuke but without the radiation which is too rare and unforeseeable a circumstance to justify the cost and resource expenditure in setting up and maintaining such a system to begin with. As a replacement for conventional artillery, rocketry, or aerial bombardment? Pfffft
“When seconds count, the rods are only minutes away” -scrawled on some space marine’s helmet 200yrs from now

>Go look up how many micrmeterites impact the ISS annually then get back to me
I called NASA
Yes, Cape fucking Canaveral NASA
They said, "not many"

Miles is a fucking time measurement
What the fuck are you smoking
>How far is to the convenience store for a pack of Pall Mall menthols?
I don't give a fuck what google maps says
Miles, schmiles
It's 12 minutes by Ford, 13.5 minutes by Dodge cause you gotta warm it up first

Now multiply that by 50 square miles

>Now multiply that by 50 square miles
Is that 50 x 50 miles or 12 x 12 minutes?
Space travel is funny...
2500 square miles
or
144 square minutes

But there's only 3 particles in 125,000 CUBIC miles of space!
How the hell is that sandpaper?
Some weak ass sandpaper!

Need to sand some wood for a roller derby car?
You better duck tape that bitch to a rocket and fly it through a few galaxies!

This is true but you can't deny how cool it'd be to see IS fucking arrow'd from space.

Packing thousands of Gs of acceleration is the problem. With all that fuel it would be easier to send a super sonic rocket. on a sub-orbital arc.

Give it time...a long time.

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You don't put them in geostationary orbit, you mong. That's just more energy you have to bleed off and it drastically increases your costs - more dV to put on target, more dV to launch that dV, more again because its all in a higher orbit and you get shittier target presentations and so need more satellites.
Not to mention that GEO is not invulnerable anyway.
Its fairly likely that the second a real shooting war happens between the top tier militaries, that will happen anyway. Denying access to their particular brand of GNSS and all the other space assets like reconnaissance, weather etc would be a huge benefit.

What planets? On everything smaller than Earth they'll be even more fragile, a fucking rail garrison missile could LEAVE Mars' orbit. More than capable of hitting anything IN orbit.
And theres nothing larger that can actually host targets.

The darts are backward.

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I feel like i should point out that the YAL-1 was designed to kill very fragile missiles, and not even by burning through the skin but rather just weakening it so the flight stress during boost tore it apart.
It would be completely useless against ground targets, and of very limited use against non-missile air targets.

Part of the reason they were initially conceptualised was because they would allow ICBM like range and response time without the risk of being confused for an ICBM launch and triggering a nuclear exchange.
You launch your satellites, and they have time to verify that it's not a FOBS or similar nuclear capable system and once done they can safely ignore launches from that satellite.
But if you launch a kinetic ICBM they have no way to be sure that it's not a nuclear strike until it impacts.
You're not wrong about it being an objectively better weapon that way, but there are external reasons not to do so.

> (OP)
>Please don't tell me you think you can just "drop" something from orbit. Orbit is freefall. Even after you spend tons of fuel just getting the thing into orbit, you're going to need another assload of fuel to break orbit quickly enough to make it relevant as a weapon, and that fuel is going to need extra fuel just to get it up there.
All of this is correct.
>Without mind-bending amounts of fuel, you're looking at a weapon that takes days or weeks from firing to impact.
This is not. The trick is that you're not completely negating the orbit, you're make it eccentric enough to intersect with the target. This means the time to target from launch is under 15 minutes. Its still expensive, but the vast majority of the cost is in getting it up there in the first place. A slow or realistic-for-a-weapon decent makes little difference in comparison to that.

Rods from god kinda suck. There's no explosion, the rod will just bury itself a few hundred, maybe 1000 feet into the ground. Hit a building or a ship with it and sure, you'll fuck it up. But adjacent buildings and ships will be fine for the most part. The sonic boom will break some windows, but the structure will survive. And this costs as ~$100 million just in launch costs per rod. Its fucking stupid.

Doesn’t the heat from atmospheric reentry, the pressure wave from reentry, maybe some liquefaction of the projectile if that helps, and some kinetic energy from impact generate sufficient energy to fuck a lot of shit up?

These rods only have the same energy as 30 tons of TNT. I know that sounds like a lot, but it's really not in the grand scheme of things. The first atomic bomb detonated, the Trinity test, was the equivalent of 8000 tons of TNT. So just looking at the energies involved we can see the Rod from God is pretty anemic.

But it gets worse; the rod will be dumping that energy over a much longer time. An A-bomb dumps it's energy in about 1 millionth of a second. The rod from god will take several seconds flying through the atmosphere, dumping energy that whole time, and then will dump the remainder of it in 1/100th of a second in the ground.

>waiting a full day for orbital support because the station is on the opposite side of the planet.
>Killed by kebabs because the ordinance doesn’t blow up their base on time
>would probably be killed in the blast wave.

>only having one instead of a network of orbiting death dealers

laughingshadowrunners.jpeg

>Kebabs make similar weapons out of stolen equipment and cargo containers.
>Cheaper and just as effective.

Good luck getting it into orbit with our stuff targeting and shooting down any HLLVs coming out of kebabistan.

All explosions are are expanding pressurized gases moving at high speeds. Replace that with a 12 ton piece of tungsten moving at Mach 10 and you’ll understand why they’re called “Rods from the Gods”

>We need an Orbital Strike now, get Space Force on the horn
>Sgt, They said we gotta get three more kills and wait a few minutes to recharge, this isn't a videogame.

Ahh, the jokes that would come if Orbital Strikes were real

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>expensive (nevermind that)
>difficult to reload
>difficult to refuel
>long wait times for weapon to orbit into position
>can only fire one salvo at a single target with very little time between impacts in the same location
You might as well launch an ICBM that reaches the target faster and is just as effective without all the other logistical problems.

Is that a nuclear HEAT round? For what purpose?

No, 50^2 is not common notation you imbecile, 50 mi^2 is. You square the unit, not the number.