Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 2465-2469 (10-14 June, 2013) Weekly Comic Discussion Thread
Method of Madness:
I'd be jealous too, Sam.
Blackjoker:
I believe this young lady is over-gasped
Skewbrow:
I dare not guess what the impact velocity of a tungsten rod "dropped" from the orbit would be. The orbit speed is about 8 km/s or Mach 25. To make it fall from the orbit at all, they need to give it a shove in the opposite direction for otherwise the rod would just continue its free fall motion along the station. The bigger the shove the faster it will fall from the orbit. But unless you spend a lot of energy (that they don't have at the station), the rod would enter atmosphere at a relatively small angle, and thus might continue to lose speed for a long time.
It would not be like a space shuttle, landing sedately at about 200 mph, but atmospheric drag would eat a significant chunk of the speed. Would anyone have a clue about the speed of the Apollo landing modules after entering the atmosphere, but before they opened the parachutes? A tungsten rod would fall faster than that (weight, shape).
Here it is explained that a 10-ton meteorite will retain only 6 per cent of its cosmic speed after surviving the upper atmosphere. A tungsten rod could be a bit heavier (also the density of tungsten is much higher than that of "ordinary space rock", so it would lose less), but sounds like Mach 10 is pushing it unless the rods are very massive (and thus also expensive to hoist to the orbit in the first place).
TL; DR; Orbital bombardment doesn't sound very energy efficient. You spend a huge amount of energy to get that mass into orbit only to have atmospheric drag consume most of it when falling.
Indicible:
Unless you extract the tungsten IN SPACE!
You only need Planetary Interaction to produce Fuel Blocks and Outpost materials (I think I should cut back on EVE a bit...)
GarandMarine:
Railguns are more efficient for kinetic kill weapons, all the fun of small yield nuclear weapons with none of the fall out!
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