• Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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    272 years ago

    The problem I remember is that it is expensive to get the rod up there in the first place.

    Also every other nation would hate us and make jokes about the collective small penis of the US state.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      That’s why the eventual strategy would be to build them in space with minerals from the asteroid belt.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        112 years ago

        That would involve building a factory in space. If we’re capable of doing that, creating a kinetic OWP with which to bombard the earth would be small ambition.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          Just slap some rockets to a big enough boulder, Planetary Annihilation (videogame) style.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Also the tungsten oxides produced in high velocity impacts are potentially worse than fallout.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Gotta mine them in space, but there’s still a whole host of other issues with the idea including aiming them, having enough stations to deploy them anywhere on the planet in a reasonable amount of time, and the other non-radioactive problems that result from throwing a fuckton of tungsten at terminal velocity into something.

    • bitwolf
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      22 years ago

      There was a YouTube video with, I think action lab, where they tested this weapon on a smaller scale with sand castles.

      The experiment failed overall because of the difficulty of aiming the payload and anticipating the correalis effect

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        32 years ago

        I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a retarded-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)

        Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.

        This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        72 years ago

        Yes. The United States of America is, itself a federated state that also represents the fifty states. It’s why we have a state department and a Secretary of State in the White House.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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        22 years ago

        It’s well within the character of the US federal government and the armed forces to go forward with an OWP platform program right now, even despite the risks and ethics concerns, sadly.