Rods of Death

For those of you who haven't been reading this blog from its inception five months ago, I'll fill you in: I'm obsessed with outer space.

Astronomy, astrophysics, general relativity, cosmology, quantum mechanics... it's all fasincating to me. I have a very limited grasp of mathematics, but I understand the basic theories and proofs of principle behind the majority of these findings.

I went back and read my blog and found a post from November highlighting USA's current domination of space.

And it brings me back to the current status on the war with the Middle East.

Bush is obsessed with being the man who spreads democracy throughout the world. Maybe it's his Christian beliefs that drive him towards this goal; but in the end, I (and the rest of the country) can see that this goal is actually his way of indoctrinating the world's population into America's world view of utter and complete domination (whether it comes from military or financial strength).

Well, if that's the case, I have an idea. A military idea. One that could maintain our nation's 2 and 5:

Drop bundles of super-dense rods onto the city from high orbit. That's right. Drop a couple hundred depleted-uranium metal poles from space. By the time they reach the inner atmosphere, they're travelling at 9.8 meters a second, squared, which means they're 30 feet faster than they were a second before. Launching them via magnetic fields will only increase their acceleration, essentially creating hundreds of individual comets. A dense cloud of metallic rods falling at several times the speed of sound makes a difficult target to destroy; and a couple of falling rods, gaining sufficient kinetic energy, could level an entire compound within seconds.

Getting stuff into orbit is difficult. It's one of the major drawbacks to the US's race for space defense. So far we have a limited number of contractors, with a limited amount of equipment, to shuffel our stuff into space. And each trip requires millions upon millions of dollars. If required, however, several shuttles (with their cargo bays devoid of superfluous equipment) could ferry these "weapons rods" into place, and drop them onto their target on a whim. You actually think the Middle East has a space program going on?! Or missile emplacements that could effectively stop a "falling rod" engagement? HAH!

An object, however small, traveling at 14 KPS (kilometers per second -- roughly 6.8 miles per second -- my math may be horribly wrong), will strike a stationary target with as much energy as a thermonuclear device. Why spend millions upon millions of dollars coming up with missile technology and ECCM when you can simply drop a couple thousand ultra-dense metallic rods onto the target with the same result? Plus, you don't have to worry about enemy ground-based lasers or countermissiles shooting your bird down before it lands. Or radiation fall-out.

I swear, I should be a military advisor.