Veritasium recently did a video on this subject, not one of his best, about objects “dropped” from orbit as a weapon with a high destructive potential. The destructive part is easy enough to understand, but I don’t get how the objects would be released and “fall” from an orbiting platform. Wouldn’t the rods just continue to orbit? To make them fall, you’d have to cancel out all or most of the orbital velocity. If you just fired them downwards, they’d still go sideways and you’d have a harder time aiming them. What am I missing?
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You’re right that they’d just stay in orbit. If they’re in a low orbit then atmospheric drag will slow them down eventually, but rods from god are useless if you need to plan where it’ll hit a decade in advance so you need something that can abruptly force it into a suborbital trajectory
There are a couple potential options. Most straightforward is to have a rocket fire in the opposite direction of the orbit to slow it down and drop it down. This one still has a bit of lag time to it
Other option is to fire it downwards *hard* either with a rocket or a magnetic launcher like a coilgun. If you launch it down at a few hundred meters per second it’ll pretty quickly get deep in the atmosphere and burn off it’s orbital velocity so it doesn’t pop back up a half orbit later. Downside, still super hard to aim so it’d likely need a continuously burning rocket engine to provide terminal guidance so yet more mass included in orbit
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