scary scary science

Having been effectively crippled by an act or pure stupidity yesterday, I decided to use my time trapped in the house to do some research. As I said in a previous post, I love learning about weapons  science and technology, and I have found something really fucking cool, and really fucking scary.

I didn't like Call of Duty Ghosts, but that's not exactly a rare opinion. Something I found cool in it was the idea of America no longer being a super power, having been crushed and occupied by a foreign force. The crushing came in the form of an orbital bombardment, so I did some research in the ODIN  bombardment system from the game and found some sciency stuff. The ODIN station uses a hypothetical weapon whereby inert projectiles are dropped above the target, gain massive amounts of momentum in their decent, and impact with extreme destructive force, simply from kinetic energy generated in their fall from orbit. Similar to the railgun, this is technology that exists, and in fact has existed since the cold war, the Russians wanted to build this thing but a treaty was signed that didn't let them, thank god. The proposed Kinetic Bombardment system would drop 6 metre long, 1 foot wide rods of tungsten from orbit, here's where the science comes in; Tungsten is used because of it's density, it's shape is used to reduce drag once it enters the atmosphere, by the time it makes impact, it will be traveling 10 times the speed of sound and deliver the destructive force of 100 tons of TNT. That is big, very big, and very cool. This weapon is very common in science fiction, and Ghosts isn't even the first CoD it's been in, I can see why sci fi writers like this weapon, it's just so sciency and cool and really unsettling, for obvious reasons. I don't know if I should add a new label for science, given that I don't know how frequent these science posts will be. I hope I have been informative though.