Wraith601

There's no questions there's massive amounts of KE involved, the question is how much of an area effect will we see. The penetrator may simply bury really deep underground and expend much of its KE that way. I'd love to see a live fire test.

On a sidenote KE weapons seem to be supplanting energy weapons in sci-fi as of late.

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Anon

You'd see an instantanoeus release.

These KE 'god rocks' actually dont penetrate deep at all(pehaps 50 feet tops for crater depth). They are most equivelant to a nuclear surface burst.

It would be exactly the same as an 8k pound solid iron meteorite hitting the earth at 6kps.

BOOM.

Nagalfar

Antimatter weapons will replace nukes, we can create antimatter at will, but we have not learned how to contain it so that it can be stored.. once they do, you can bet your last buck that antimatter weapons will replace nukes.

With antimatter weapons you get all the same bang, but with a nice side effect, no residual radiation, you can destroy a city, and the area is clean for use, no radiation. It is my thought, that this will make this type of weapon far more dangerous than nukes.. there will be less resistance to employing their use due to the simple fact there are none of the bad "side effects" of using a nuke, but the same city destroying ability.

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FOG3

Are you talking about for defense systems, or mainline weapons? Seems as how KE weapons have an extra momentum component to help with penetration, that a purely energy approach does not it isn't necessarily the way to go. With the move towards composite armor, which is at least believed to have ceramics in it, it's not like planned vehicles aren't setup to deal with energy weapons, either. Of course particle beam weapons are a little more tricky, but they have their inherent issues, especially in atmosphere.

One of the engineering problems with an anti-matter bomb will be simply getting it to go bang properly. There's issues with it just spreading out and basically causing residual heating, instead of a nice boom. Electromagnetic repulsion of the particles and issues with them actually colliding with their anti-particle as opposed to missing would need to be dealt with in addition to the containment issues. There's just a lot of empty space on that scale.

Anon

Particle accelerators definitely qualify as beam weapons.

And i'm talking "In general". I expect that in less than 100 years beam weapons will dominate LOS direct fire combat, both offensively and defensively.

FOG3

Well charged particle beams naturally spread from electromagnetic repulsions between the particles, and you're going to have beam attenuation from interacting with stuff. Neutral particle beams are kind of tricky to get working the way you want them to, and also will suffer beam attentuation in atmosphere. Main advantage is, as presently conceived they're near C and neutral particles are good at pentrating stuff due to their low interaction with matter, hence the utility of neutron bombs on armor.

From what I remember reading on the SDI program they really were only intended to take out the guidance circuitry of enemy ICBMs, and to be based in space. I suppose if you were fighting momentum constraints, and had the energy resources and capability to make them compact enough it could work. Seems as how you have things like heat resistant ceramics and techniques to increase survivability against neutron bombs already on MBTs, I wouldn't personally go so far as to call it a given to dominate for offensive purposes in the future though, but that's just my opinion.

dalem

Antimatter is very expensive to make. Even if we could store it, I can't imagine the costs of creation and storage with current technology.

As far as the "god rod", I like the nickname "Tunguska" better. Let's buy lots of them. They may be expensive to build, but an inert KE warhead could be maintained by a pack of drunken monkeys (or even Democrats), as compared to the care and feeding I imagine are needed for a nukular package.

Right?

-dale

highsea

Lol, you're killing me dale.

Maybe we can come up with a KE warhead made from inert democrats.

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FOG3

Yeah, but we'd have to figure out how to make something so highly volatile as a democrat inert first. Afterall they blow up on just about everything.

Democrat: There's global warning, BAN BAN BAN.
Democrat: Guns kill people, BAN BAN BAN.

Why they're practically as volatile as unstabilized nitro.

Officer of Engineers

Think it's whine, whine, whine.

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gunnut

Can we achieve "critical mass" if we pack enough democrats into one area? Can we do that with normal democrats or do we have to refine them and hand-pick the leftists?

Canmoore

Years back, me and some friends were talking about cold fusion, and the benefits and drawbacks it would bring us.

Someone brought up the idea of Fusion being used as a weapon...what if we were able to create mini-suns as a weapon...then implode them somehow to create a super-nova! we could go on a rampage dystroying entire solar systems....

Empire and you Star Dystroyer step back, the ability to dystroy a planet is insignifigant next to the power of dystroying a solar system! lol

but really though, fission (nuclear) bombs are very poweful, but can anyone even contimplate how powerful a cold-fussion bomb could be??

Officer of Engineers

Cold fusion won't make a supernova anymore than anti-matter bombs will. The entire thing is still limited to Einstein's E=mc^2. If you have insufficent mass, than it doesn't matter what the process is, you're not going to get a supernova.

Canmoore

phooey....well it was a cood idea lol

HistoricalDavid

You've underestimated the energy content of TNT by three magnitudes.

After all, I doubt the rocket fuel in one 87-ton ICBM contains as much energy as 15,500 tons of TNT, even if it were perfectly efficiently transformed into KE.

Still, 15 tons of TNT with no radiation or fallout sounds good.