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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Orbits have to be maintained through some type of Rocket or thruster.
An orbital drop kinetic bombardment weapon would have neither thrusters nor Rockets so as soon as it detaches from the object that it’s launched from its orbit will begin to decay.
Figuring out when and where to release it and calculating the orbital Decay is how you would aim the weapon
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