High orbits are probably the way to go anyway. Not only will the payload be decently higher, the entry angle will be much steeper and more accurate, much easier hide, and much more capable of hitting anywhere in the world. This trades an hour’s delay for a day’s delay, but this size of weapon is a strategic weapon anyway.
Why would you need to blow up a city in an hour’s notice, but not as soon as possible? If WDMs can be used in this situation (MAD doesn’t apply), just use a normal ICBM. 15-30 minutes, possibly much larger booms. The advantage of orbital kinetics is stealth and immunity to countermeasures. A country-wide strike could be arranged with only seconds of warning for the targets, possibly getting ahead of most launch sites, leaving only mobile launchers to deal with.
That of course means a new intelligence war, but whoever gets there first has an unstoppable weapon, which might be important depending on how good interceptor weapons get. Even the idea of feasible hypersonic ICBMs is twisting knickers for a reason.
There are very few situations where that amount of lifting capacity is available for such a niche use. But more has been done for stupider, so something dumb very well could end up flying dangerously.
I have my doubts about that stealth. If it were just the tungsten rod by itself, it could well be coated in black, but the impulse needed to drop a massive projectile out of an orbit (and furthermore into a trajectory that impacts at the target) necessitates a relatively hefty maneuvering unit and that has to radiate heat to be kept operational. Cheaping out on the propulsion could be very costly because a failure in the middle of the deorbit burn would result in the rod coming down in a place you don’t want it to.
The only way to hide it would be with decoys, which are already used by ICBM’s. Unlike ICBM’s, an orbital platform would need those decoys well before it’s used because there’s no terrain to hide in. A ballistic missile sub is very hard to track, satellites, not so much.
About countermeasures: Becuse the rod can’t move by itself, it’s stuck on a fixed trajectory after the propulsion stage is discarded. This makes it an easy target for an interceptor missile. You already know where to look so the stealthy rod isn’t that hard to find, and then you just have to collide with it. And because the rod is coming down from MEO at the very least, you have ample time to do all this. An impact at such speeds would disintigrate anything and the rod isn’t an exception. At the very least it would fracture into multiple less aerodynamic pieces that do much less damage than the sum of their parts.
High orbits are probably the way to go anyway. Not only will the payload be decently higher, the entry angle will be much steeper and more accurate, much easier hide, and much more capable of hitting anywhere in the world. This trades an hour’s delay for a day’s delay, but this size of weapon is a strategic weapon anyway.
Why would you need to blow up a city in an hour’s notice, but not as soon as possible? If WDMs can be used in this situation (MAD doesn’t apply), just use a normal ICBM. 15-30 minutes, possibly much larger booms. The advantage of orbital kinetics is stealth and immunity to countermeasures. A country-wide strike could be arranged with only seconds of warning for the targets, possibly getting ahead of most launch sites, leaving only mobile launchers to deal with.
That of course means a new intelligence war, but whoever gets there first has an unstoppable weapon, which might be important depending on how good interceptor weapons get. Even the idea of feasible hypersonic ICBMs is twisting knickers for a reason.
There are very few situations where that amount of lifting capacity is available for such a niche use. But more has been done for stupider, so something dumb very well could end up flying dangerously.
I have my doubts about that stealth. If it were just the tungsten rod by itself, it could well be coated in black, but the impulse needed to drop a massive projectile out of an orbit (and furthermore into a trajectory that impacts at the target) necessitates a relatively hefty maneuvering unit and that has to radiate heat to be kept operational. Cheaping out on the propulsion could be very costly because a failure in the middle of the deorbit burn would result in the rod coming down in a place you don’t want it to.
The only way to hide it would be with decoys, which are already used by ICBM’s. Unlike ICBM’s, an orbital platform would need those decoys well before it’s used because there’s no terrain to hide in. A ballistic missile sub is very hard to track, satellites, not so much.
About countermeasures: Becuse the rod can’t move by itself, it’s stuck on a fixed trajectory after the propulsion stage is discarded. This makes it an easy target for an interceptor missile. You already know where to look so the stealthy rod isn’t that hard to find, and then you just have to collide with it. And because the rod is coming down from MEO at the very least, you have ample time to do all this. An impact at such speeds would disintigrate anything and the rod isn’t an exception. At the very least it would fracture into multiple less aerodynamic pieces that do much less damage than the sum of their parts.