Would weaponising asteroids be a possible and effective weapon?
Lets say America strapped some boosters on one then set a course for Moscow. Total deniability and get to look like world heroes by heroically taking the lead to rebuild the country (to your liking)
>>28262088
This is the most insane idea ever. The damage and collateral would be almost enough to discourage anyone.
But not me. Let's fucking do this /k/
>>28262099
I'm sure you could calculate the size and velocity of the asteroid required for the mission
Dear christ.
So your plan is to have a vehicle carry boosters into what, the Kuiper belt? Find a suitable asteroid, plot a transfer into LEO over the course of a year, all undetected mind you, then from LEO, precisely calculate the exact change in heading and velocity necessary to bring the asteroid down on top of Moscow and not say undershoot by a few hundred meters per second and end up obliterating Berlin, or falling harmlessly into the countryside instead?
Why not just drop a fucking ICBM on Moscow and call it a day?
The karmic impact might be severe.
Decades later, the people behind it would spill the beans after pickling their liver and melting their minds with drugs.
Plus, you realize, EVERYONE can just look up and wonder what you're doing in the asteroid belt.
>>28262088
>>28262121
Massive kinetic impact is a hell of a weapon, but at the point that it becomes practical and cost-effective it also becomes too devastating to dare use on your own planet.
>>28262121
False explosion of "Mars Colony craft" sets up mining colony on the dark side of the moon
>Why not just drop a fucking ICBM on Moscow and call it a day?
Because of the giant exhaust trail leading back to you?
>>28262123
What happened to the Enola Gay pilots?
Maybe just liquidate anyone involved in the project after or not hire a bunch of hippies?
Rocks are not 'free', citizen.
Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor’s naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor’s ship’s paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor’s fuel.
Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor’s bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor’s Servitors must use the Emperor’s auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordinance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor’s officers may begin manoeuvring the Emperor’s warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor’s fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet.
After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor’s fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor’s desires, the Emperor’s ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away.
After twiddling away the Emperor’s time and eating the Emperor’s food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor’s enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordinance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor’s ship does not need to attempt any last-minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor’s fuel).
Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following:
Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials
Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI
Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI
Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI
Paint, Titan class warship: 2.5 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI
Total: 9.8 MI
Contrasted with the following:
5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI
One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI
One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI
Total: 2.9 MI
>>28262129
At literally no point would it ever become either practical or cost effective.
The cost of putting a vehicle into space carrying the boosters, rendezvousing with a selected asteroid, and then moving an asteroid of such a mass that it was capable of obliterating a large city back to Earth would cost orders of magnitude more than it costed to drop all the bombs dropped during the entirety of World War 2.
>>28262142
Do you think Moscow isn't going to notice that a couple years ago you launched a vehicle into space whose only payload were boosters, and then over the course of a couple years an asteroid who has been identified and tracked for twenty years and who's orbit about the sun is entirely known suddenly and abruptly began a rendezvous with Earth isn't going to raise any red flags?
>>28262156
Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet.
The Emperor, through this – His Office of Imperial Outlays – hereby orders you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance. Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI, Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.
For the Emperor,
Bursarius Tenathis,
Purser Level XI,
Imperial Office of Outlays.
>>28262158
>Do you think Moscow isn't going to notice that a couple years ago you launched a vehicle into space whose only payload were boosters, and then over the course of a couple years an asteroid who has been identified and tracked for twenty years and who's orbit about the sun is entirely known suddenly and abruptly began a rendezvous with Earth isn't going to raise any red flags?
As long as the rest of the world doesnt believe them you can play it off if you keep your pokerface
>>28262088
Functionally, yes. A suitably sized asteroid would render Moscow a crater, and potentially wreck the rest of Europe. The problem with this idea though is not the idea itself, it is the logistics of it.
You see, NASA has the equipment, technology and experience to track Asteroids, tiny bits (compared to the size of everything else you'd be looking at) of rock that variate from quite hot (the side facing the sun, with no atmosphere to stop it) to quite cold, but still warm compared to the background (side facing away from the sun, other side of the asteroid will warm the cold side up).
NASA actually tracks quite a lot of asteroids and uses supercomputers to track their trajectories, computing potential impacts decades in advance. The problem with this though?
These systems work on heat and reflection from an object, sensitive enough to pick out a 5 meter wide rock out of the cosmos hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. These asteroids actually have a very very small signature. A rocket engine would be picked out extremely easy, at that point all you need to do is point a radio telescope in it's direction and pick off the command/control radio signals coming off the thing.
If NASA has this, you can bet your ass Russia has it, possibly even more powerful. As soon as you launched a rocket to maneuver the asteroid, Russia would be able to pick it up.
Russia also monitors all commercial/military space launches, generally attempting to get a satellite over the area and watch it through TV/web broadcasts. The rocket you'd have to use to do what you're thinking would be extremely large, most likely larger than the Saturn V that was used in the Apollo missions.
You may be able to do it, yes. But it'd be a multi-year affair, you may fuck up your calculations and end up missing Earth entirely, or even turning the UK into a crater (although that's not really a bad thing I guess...) and you'd be invaded before you could completely go through with it.
OP = fag
>>28262142
The Enola Gay pilots were heroes. To this day, if a soldier gets wounded in the middle east, they get a Purple Heart meant for troops that got wounded during the invasion of Japan. The bombs killed a lot of people, but many, many, many more would have died during an invasion.
They saved lives and they knew it. I'm sure it was still a burden on their minds, but all logic and evidence said they did the most righteous and humane thing possible.
Dropping an asteroid on a country that doesn't bother us at all is a crime against humanity. And that would kill a man's desire to live. The world's most prolific executioner, Vasily Blokhin, drank himself to death over a fraction of the deaths what you're suggesting would cause.
>>28262088
It's impossible to hide such a project. The only way to hide in space is by pretending to be someone else. Since nobody operates near asteroids, everyone would know who has done it.
>>28262351
Outside radar range you're looking for shit with the equivalent of giant binoculars. If whatever is in space doesn't reflect loads of sunlight you're basically SOL. Because the chances of you seeing an object via it blocking starlight is astronomically low.
Known asteroids aren't actively tracked by telescopes either they're just looked at once and modeled into a computer. Unless they're a threat. You could do anything to most asteroids and no one would know, especially if you knew the schedules of the largest telescopes.
>>28262351
>>28263345
No, what he's saying is you can't "Sneak" into space and do this kinda crap without anyone else knowing.
Your going about this all wrong.
We do thd asteroid research mission.
We set up the rock. When we leave, we accidentally bump it out of orbit.
Later we use ion thrusters to gradually bring it in to alignment.
Fifty years down the road. BAM!
No more Eurasia!
Realistically though. Asteroids are probably better for obliterating a planet you don't plan on using for a while.
>>28263345
*IF* there were boosters strapped to an unthreatening asteroid *right now*, and someone turned them on and they nudged it into a new orbit that intersected Earth, it's *possible* that it would take a while for everybody to figure out that it was a known asteroid on a new trajectory, not a new asteroid.
In the long run, though, astronomers would probably realize where it came from. That's the least problem, though.
There's also the problem that it's impossible to aim an asteroid to single-city accuracy from that far out with a single nudge. You'd need several course corrections along the way, including almost certainly one or more atmospheric entry burns to ensure it hit the city you wanted, and not the ocean on the other side of the planet. It's extremely likely that someone will notice that the thing keeps changing its orbit--a clear sign of interference.
*Even if* you could somehow miraculously model its path perfeclty in theory, so that one nudge put it onto an orbit that would cause it to intersect Earth's atmosphere at just the right time and angle, in conjunction with the Earth's rotation, to put it on top of Moscow, there's no guarantee that you would get it right in practice. The price of failure for fucking it up would be colossal. You'd have to be prepared to steer it all the way to atmospheric entry. At that point, you've lost deniability and why even bother?
And even then, there's no real guarantee that it will land exactly where intended. Its shape will cause it to deviate from an ideal trajectory. Its composition might cause it to break up or explode or otherwise not go according to plan.
And all of that ignores that you can't put boosters on an asteroid in secret anyway. People know what goes into space. People know what goes into Low Earth Orbit. People notice what's supposed to go into LEO but has way too much launch vehicle for such a mission. People notice what's supposed to go to LEO but goes on a translunar trajectory instead.
>>28262156
>>28262159
Damn, came here to post it.
>>28263494
(continued)
People notice what goes on a translunar trajectory and sends signals back. There's no way to hide the signals from everyone on earth who knows how to point an antenna at the sky.
People notice what goes on a translunar trajectory and *doesn't* send signals back. And anyway good luck trying to run the mission without talking to your spacecraft after launch.
People will fucking *figure out* that your lying space mission that lies is somehow related to the mysterious giant rock bomb out of space that shows up a few months later.
And what are you going to send, anyway? Robots? The robotics haven't been developed yet. So that's a whole other army of people, besides mission ops, who are going to speak out when you rock a city full of innocent people.
Astronauts? The tech and logistics for a long-range manned space mission haven't been worked out, either. So that's another army of people, plus a *massive* manned space mission project that will take a decade or more to develop, and will necessarily happen in public, and will be obvious as fuck, no matter what you end up doing with it.
Rocking a city? Fuck yeah seaking. Sky's the limit. Go full retard.
Doing it deniably? Your idea is literally cancer.
>boosters
Boosters aren't necessary. Just use a gravitation tractor set up. Simply place a probe near the asteroid to influence its path towards earth.
Obviously nuke development has stagnated to this is the next stage.
My pic has nothing to do with this thread.
>>28262156
>>28263526
>Goodbye Eurasia
Thats why I didn't type goodbye Moscow.
At best you could hope to annihilate a region no a specific city.
>>28264144
100m bolides are for city strikes.
>>28262175
>As long as the rest of the world doesnt believe them you can play it off if you keep your pokerface
At that point, if that's what the US was going for, they'd be better off just showcasing their true conventional might by turning Russia into a moonscape. At that point it really doesn't matter what the world thinks, one CSG rivals the overall tonnage of the next 11 largest Navies combined.
>>28262121
The Kuiper Belt? I don't think you need to go that far for asteroids.
>>28262088
>implying they don't already do this
>implying that the legendary tsunamis in the east that kill thousands of people
few people know this but the legendary tsunamis are actually world government experiments in asteroid redirection and weaponization, they literally crash giant asteroids into the sea to cause the giant tsunamis. a few thousand dead poor asians is nothing to the globalist regime especially when it comes to the study and testing of military science that could potentially give the globalists a massive advantage against all who oppose.
Char Aznable please
>>28267507
Fuck Australia
>>28263643
This would take a really long time. Like so long that everybody would notice the asteroid's orbit had changed long before it ever got near earth.
And everybody would know it was your "probe" that was shitting it up.
OP your idea is feasible only when the scale is planetary - i.e. you want to delete a planet from the map.
The accuracy needed to land a "small" asteroid on top of moscow would mean that any possible "covert" nature of the operation isn't going to work. Everyone is going to figure out it was "you" who did it, it's just too hard to steer an asteroid on a precise target like that. Can't keep such a big secret.
>>28267735
Again, 100m rocks are not planet killers. They are city killers.
>>28267750
If you could aim it sure.
The problem is aiming it.
Asymmetrical objects have odd tendencies on reentry. It fucks up the trajectory something fierce. So no, it's not really feasible to just hit the city. At absolute best you have somewhere in the range of a 100 mile radius around the city. That's a huge fucking circle where 25 miles out and you've obliterated some farms and maybe caused structural damage.
>>28270405
That's a bit generous. I didn't bother actually seeing the amount of force that would have as far as diameter of impact.
And a 200 mile target is also probably a very generous estimate.
If you want to do this, tungsten rods from orbit. it works basically the same, but it's much more feasible.
>>28263643
and how man centuries would it take to impart the 5~ km/s delta-v to a large asteroid doing that?
