Exactly. Orbital bombardment isnt cost effective when 99% of the time, you can get the job done with bombs dropped from planes, Tomahawks, JASSMs, etc for a fraction of the price. Particularly when many targets are mobile.
But if you have a Maverick style immobile, heavily defended target...dropping a telephone pole sized tungsten rod at 7600 MPH is unstoppable. AAA? Tungsten laughs at you. ABM systems? Tungsten rod dont care. Reinforced concrete underground bunkers? Tungsten rod collapses them. Armor? Tungsten rod goes through that like a lawn dart through a Chihuahua. ECM? Tungsten rod is math on the front end to target its deorbiting, physics on the back end. You cant jam gravity.
Tungsten rods from space are a 9 ton honey badger.
Until a slight breeze sets them off target by 200 yards... It's a stupid idea compared to cheaper, more effective alternatives. They are probably hoping other countries will waste resources developing this boondoggle.
A slight breeze barely effects my 300 Winchester magnum, fire rounds less than a third of an inch wide.
The real failings have already been mentioned, getting that shit up there in the first place, and breaking the satellite.
Otherwise its like a freight train, and the target is a penny on the tracks. No amount of wind is pushing that train off course
At what range? Wind easily blows a rifle round way off course at 1000+ yards, when it's only been traveling for a second or two. We're talking about a long time to fall from low earth orbit to the ground, most of that in the atmosphere. Likely 45 minutes at the fastest, thousands of times longer than a bullet takes to reach 1000 yards.
Most objects just disintegrate at mach 10. Not only special materials, but also carefully calculated aerodynamics are needed to make it work. The explosion of an air defence missile has just to tilt the rod a little bit and it will melt away.
What if we coat it with ceramic?
Special materials are needed anyway. Russia has hypersonic missiles because they have such materials. But aerodynamics are also important. China has hypersonic missiles because they have built shockwave tunnels to hone the fluid dynamics computer models they have stolen from the US. A country that cannot build hypersonic missiles cannot build hypersonic rods.
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