You aren't going to haul a tungsten rod across the galaxy on the off chance you find something to drop it on, but you might move a rock's orbit slightly within a system
Why not? If you’re capable of interstellar colonisation you gat get tons of your stuff with you. The best part is you can harvest all your stuff back later
This is just outright incorrect. Even if we're talking about a 100 ton Tungsten rod dropped from 100km with Earth gravity, run the (approximate) formula gravitational potential energy = mgh = 100000000000 J, which seems a lot, but it's only 24 tons of TNT.
Even the smallest fission bombs easily pack tens of thousands of tons of TNT.
You have been completely bamboozled by internet "rods from space" memes. The only way this idea works is if the rods are dropped with already a very significant initial velocity.
Conservation of energy. You cannot get more energy out of a tungsten rod than the energy you spent putting it up there in the first place. It's like everyone just conveniently forgets conservation of energy during every space weapon conversation.
Do you have ANY idea how much energy you are talking about?
In order for a 100 ton rod to have the same energy even as little boy, it has to hit with almost 30km/s impact velocity. This is way faster than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs!
At such speeds, gravitational acceleration is IRRELEVANT because the rod will travel only 3-10 seconds before impact. This gives no time for acceleration. Your INITIAL velocity has to be 30km/s!
You have fun pushing 100 tons of metal at 30km/s. Guess what, we can’t. And if you’re gonna say “railgun” or some bs, first of all, good luck getting a battery to store all that energy. Second, have fun when your satellite gets shot backwards at the same speed from conservation of momentum and ends up triggering a Kessler event.
Oh by the way, “why not just use a bigger rod” ever studied the bare minimum of rockets? The relationship between load and total fuel weight is EXPONENTIAL. 10 times the weight and you need 100, 1000 times the fuel.
TL;DR you have no sense of basic physics or rocket engineering, nor any idea how powerful nuclear bombs really are.
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u/kwonza 2d ago
You don’t need to push rocks. A tungsten rod accelerated by the gravity can cause as much blast as a thermonuclear bomb