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 not missing anything, those are just a concept weapon designed by never made as it’s not worth it for reasons you stated (expensive to get them to space, expensive to keep there until you need them, once you need them, they’re kinda hard to aim accurately (which probably wouldn’t matter since the crater they’d leave would be so big) )…
But the idea is gravity would just pull them down (as far as i remember)
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